Dr. Hadji Bakara
Assistant Professor, University of Michigan, Department of English Language and Literature
Keynote Address: “Refugee Futures and the Politics of Time”
Few figures embody the condition of liminality as explicitly as the modern refugee. Whether it is a refugee’s experience of life in transit or their perpetual waiting, their relegation to ‘temporary’ spaces like camps and detention centers, or their displacement from historical time into exceptional temporalities of ‘emergency’ or ‘crisis,’ refugees are barred from the inhabitation of accepted community, a stable present, and a common future. What’s more, attitudes towards refugees show how closely the boundaries of an imposed liminality can double as the boundaries of the political imagination. As Hannah Arendt predicted nearly a century ago, the imagined exceptionality of refugees––their perpetual betweenness––has become the condition of intelligibility for conceiving both territorial sovereignty and historical progress. Only if refugees are kept in suspension, that is, can order be maintained in both space and time. In recent decades, however, several interlocking forces––including neoliberalism’s pervasive dispossessions, perpetual war, and climate catastrophe––have created an unprecedented number of refugees globally, and so dissolved the imputed boundaries of the refugee’s liminal position. As it becomes increasingly common to anticipate what Donna Haraway calls a collective future “without refuge,” the refugee’s place morphs from one of liminality to universality. This lecture uses refugee writing from the last century––from Jewish refugee writers in the 1940s, to South Asian refugees in the 1980s, and African migrant writers in the present––to examine and theorize the political effects of unsettling the liminal status of the displaced, migrant, or otherwise non-sovereign person.