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    The figure of the refugee in Hassan Blasim’s “The Reality and the Record” 
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    • The figure of the refugee in Hassan Blasim’s “The Reality and the Record”
    •   QMRO Home
    • School of English and Drama
    • Department of English
    • Twentieth Century and Contemporary, including World Literatures
    • The figure of the refugee in Hassan Blasim’s “The Reality and the Record”
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    The figure of the refugee in Hassan Blasim’s “The Reality and the Record”

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    Accepted version (157.1Kb)
    Publisher
    SAGE Publications
    DOI
    10.1177/0021989417707802
    Journal
    Journal of Commonwealth Literature
    ISSN
    1741-6442
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Abstract
    This article considers Hassan Blasim’s short story, “The Reality and the Record”. It argues that Blasim’s asylum seeker should be read as a powerful challenge to extant responses to the ever-growing global refugee crisis: a vision of the many difficulties faced by twenty-first-century displaced persons, no longer confined to the refugee camps of the mid-twentieth century most often associated with Palestinian literature in the Middle East, but seeking elusive shelter in Europe. I argue that Blasim’s short story highlights the impossibility of the demands placed upon those seeking shelter in the developed world, reminding us of the under-recognized role of trauma, narrative, agency, and especially evidence in seeking humanitarian asylum. By undermining any confidence we might have in an idealized “truth”, the text questions the morality of asylum-seeking processes in the developed world, demanding that its readers reevaluate their own stance in relation to displaced persons, and asserting that the burden of narrating oneself into a place of safety, of performing worthy victimhood, is neither just, nor feasible.
    Authors
    ATIA, NH
    URI
    http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/23983
    Collections
    • Twentieth Century and Contemporary, including World Literatures [27]
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    © 2017, © SAGE Publications
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