Vanessa Agnew, Kader Konuk, Jane O. Newman (eds.) Refugee Routes The Academy in Exile Book Series | Volume 1 Editorial The Academy in Exile Book Series is edited by Vanessa Agnew, Kader Konuk and Egemen Özbek. Vanessa Agnew is a professor in Anglophone studies at the Universität Duisburg- Essen and a senior researcher at the Australian National University. She was educated at the University of Queensland (BMus), New York University (MA), University of Wales (PhD), and Open University (BSc). Her Enlightenment Orpheus: The Power of Music in Other Worlds (Oxford UP, 2008) won the Oscar Kenshur Prize for 18th-century studies and the American Musicological Society's Lewis Lockwood Award. She co-organizes the Critical Thinking Program of the Academy in Exile. Kader Konuk is a professor of Turkish studies at the Universität Duisburg- Essen. In 2017, she founded the Academy in Exile, which offers over 37 scholars at risk fellowships to continue their research in Berlin and Essen. Trained as a comparatist in German, Turkish, and English literature, Konuk focuses on the disciplinary nexus between literary criticism, cultural studies, and intellectual history. Her research is situated at the intersections between religious and ethnic communities, beginning with the Ottoman modernization reforms and continuing on to Turkish-German relations in the twenty-first century. Her work examines cultural practices that evolve in the context of East-West relations (travel, migration, and exile). Jane O. Newman is a professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine. She has published on 16th- and 17th-century English, German, and neo-Latin political theory, literature, and culture and the disciplinary history of Renaissance and Baroque studies. Newman has held Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Humboldt fellowships, was the M.H. Abrams Fellow at the National Humanities Center (Research Triangle, North Carolina) (2015-16), and held a Berlin Prize at the American Academy in Berlin (2017). She is the Chair of the University of California Systemwide Coordinating Committee for Scholars at Risk. Vanessa Agnew, Kader Konuk, Jane O. Newman (eds.) Refugee Routes Telling, Looking, Protesting, Redressing The publication of this volume has been underwritten by generous support from the University of California Irvine, the Volkswagen Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This book is freely available in an open access edition thanks to funding from the Universität Duisburg-Essen. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 (BY-NC-ND) which means that the text may be used for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ To create an adaptation, translation, or derivative of the original work and for commercial use, further permission is required and can be obtained by contacting rights@transcript-publishing.com Creative Commons license terms for re-use do not apply to any content (such as graphs, figures, photos, excerpts, etc.) not original to the Open Access publication and further permission may be required from the rights holder. The obligation to research and clear permission lies solely with the party re-using the material. © 2020 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Vanessa Agnew, photographed by Jobst von Kunowski Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5013-6 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5013-0 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839450130 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper. Contents Dedication ............................................................................. 9 Acknowledgements .................................................................. 11 Introduction Refugee Routes Connecting the Displaced and the Emplaced Vanessa Agnew ........................................................................... 17 Flight Refugees Once Again? Rethinking the History of Ezidi Forced Migration and Displacement Zeynep Türkyılmaz ....................................................................... 33 Right to Arrive Topographies of Genocide, Flight, and Hospitality – Then and Now Vanessa Agnew and Egemen Özbek ........................................................ 51 Telling Hunted Scholarship How Fugitive Ideas Change the World Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o ........................................................................ 89 Antaram’s Journey Nazan Maksudyan ........................................................................ 99 List of Figures ...................................................................... 13 Walk past the vines, past the orchards Meltem Gürle ............................................................................ 109 Re-Rooting German Literary Responses to the ‘Migrant Crisis’ Space and the Colonial Past in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, ging, gegangen (2015) and Bodo Kirchhoff’s Widerfahrnis (2016) Christiane Steckenbiller .................................................................. 117 Teaching with Grief An Exploration of Politics, Pain, and Power in Monsieur Lazhar Hande Gürses ........................................................................... 139 Looking Calais’s ‘Jungle’ Refugees, Biopolitics, and the Arts of Resistance Debarati Sanyal ......................................................................... 159 Refugee Trajectories Post-1945 Refugee Management and the Implications of Demography as a Field Aslı Iğsız ................................................................................ 193 Suffering and its Depiction through Visual Culture How Refugees are Turned into Enemies and Figures of Hatred: The Australian Case Claudia Tazreiter ......................................................................... 211 Protesting In Another’s Shoes? Walking, Talking, and the Ethics of Storytelling in Refugee Tales and Refugee Tales II Harriet Hulme ........................................................................... 227 The Civil March for Aleppo Zero-Level Protest or Networking in Action? Clara Zimmermann ...................................................................... 247 Redressing Academy in Exile Knowledge at Risk Kader Konuk ............................................................................ 269 Scholar Rescue The Past of the Future Jane O. Newman ........................................................................ 285 List of Contributors ................................................................ 299 Index ................................................................................. 305 Dedication This book is dedicated to those who have had to leave their homes and to those who set a place at the table. And in memory of our homes, abandoned and makeshift, in Kondosu Köyü, Istanbul, Cologne, Stones Hill, and Wacol Migrant Hostel. Acknowledgements The editors gratefully acknowledge Egemen Özbek’s and Christopher Geissler’s as- sistance in preparing the manuscript for publication. Additional thanks are due to Amanda Swain and Julia Reinhard Lupton of the University of California, Irvine’s Humanities Commons (Irvine, CA, USA) for supporting publication of the volume and Steve Hindle of the Huntington Library (San Marino, CA, USA) for facilitating editorial work on the volume. Publication has also been made possible through the financial support of the University of Duisburg-Essen and Academy in Exile. List of Figures Figure 3.1. Vanessa Agnew, Kindertransport, 2018, linoleum, mulberry paper. .............. 54 Figure 3.2. Vanessa Agnew, Refugee Plaque, 2016, granite, brass flashing. ................. 55 Figure 3.3. Vanessa Agnew, Fleeing, 1945, 2015, glass teapot, model figures. ............... 56 Figure 3.4. Vanessa Agnew, Refugee Ludo, 2017, game set, modelling clay. ................. 56 Figure 3.5. Vanessa Agnew, Then and Now, 2017, acrylic box, backgammon set, brass plaque, prayer beads, coin, paper, mobile phone. ................................... 57 Figure 3.6. Vanessa Agnew,Wanderlust Life Jacket, 2017, life jacket, souvenir travel patches. . 58 Figure 3.7. Map of Turkey, ca. 1915 ; source: Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen. ................... 69 Figure 3.8 Armenian Women; source: Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen. ......................... 70 Figure 3.9 Armenian Family Portrait; source: Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen. .................. 71 Figure 3.10 Burning Street; source: Armin T. Wegner, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen. .......... 72 Figure 3.11. Abandoned Child,1915−1916; source: Armin T. Wegner, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen. 73 Figure 3.12. After a Massacre, 1915−1916; source: Armin T. Wegner, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen. 74 Figure 3.13. Corpses in the Desert, 1915−1916; source: Armin T. Wegner, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen. ......................................................................... 75 Figure 3.14. Refugees on the Coast, 1915−1916; source: Armin T. Wegner, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen. ......................................................................... 76 Figure 3.15. Armenian Mother Fleeing, 1915−1916; source: Armin T. Wegner, Wallstein Ver- lag, Göttingen. ..................................................................... 77 Figure 3.16 Camp at the Anatolian Railway; source: Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen. ............ 78 Figure 3.17. Delousing, 1915−1916; source: Armin T. Wegner, Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen. .... 79 Figure 5.1. Antaram at her home in İcadiye, with her beloved cigarette in hand, 1970s . .... 100 Figure 5.2 Armenian genocide orphans, place and date unknown. ........................ 104 Figure 5.3. The young couple, Antaram and Hmayak, managed to build a new life for themselves in the 1920s in Istanbul. ............................................... 106 Figure 5.4. Antaram with her daughters Sona and Maryam at their house door, 1940s . .... 107 Figure 5.5. Antaram holding the hand of the author’s father, Vartan, on his first school day, 1958 . ........................................................................ 108 Figure 5.6. Antaram and the author, 1980 ................................................ 108 Figure 8.1.Bashir taking attendance. .................................................... 143 Figure 8.2 Photograph of Martine Lachance with hand-drawn wings and rope above her head. ............................................................................ 145 14 List of Figures Figure 8.3. Bashir looking at the framed photograph of his wife and children. ............. 146 Figure 8.4. Bashir holding the photograph, this time without the frame. ................... 147 Figure 8.5.Headshot of Simon. .......................................................... 148 Figure 8.6 Class photo with Bashir. ...................................................... 149 Figure 8.7. Bashir looking at the signs inside the room where his asylum case is heard. ... 152 Figure 9.1. (Top) Calais – the fence. (Bottom) Calais – the container camp. ................ 160 Figure 9.2.Song of Ethiopia. ............................................................. 167 Figure 9.3 Feather on sea foam. ........................................................ 168 Figure 9.4. Shoe half buried in the sand. ................................................. 170 Figure 9.5.Clothing on barbed wire fence. ............................................... 171 Figure 9.6 Fingerprint mutilation by razor. ............................................... 174 Figure 9.7. Temesghen, ‘They are making us slaves’. ...................................... 174 Figure 9.8 Fingerprint mutilation by burning. ............................................ 179 Figure 9.9. Scarred hands. ............................................................... 179 Figure 9.10.‘We, the united people of the Jungle, Calais’. ................................. 186 Figure 9.11 ‘Dans le calme, le face-à-face entre migrants et CRS’. ......................... 187 Figure 11.1. Portrait of Behrouz Boochani, Manus Island, 2018 . ............................ 220 Figure 13.1. The Civil March for Aleppo on the route from Rataje nad Sázavou to Zruč nad Sázavou (23km), Czech Republic, in January 2017 . ................................. 248 Figure 13.2. ‘Tea break’ in Croatia in March 2017 . ......................................... 250 Figure 13.3. The Civil March for Aleppo in Tyre, Lebanon, in August 2017 . ................. 251 Figure 13.4. The official end of the Civil March for Aleppo at the Lebanon-Syria border in August 2017 ..................................................................... 252 Figure 13.5. The Civil March for Aleppo at the ‘Cemetery of Refugees’ near the village of Kato Tritos on Lesbos, Greece, in June 2017 ...................................... 255 Figure 13.6. Morning ‘news flash’ before the start of the walk from Knežica to Kozarac, Bosnia, in March 2017 . ............................................................ 261 Figure 13.7. The marching group in Glashütte, in Teupitz, Germany, in December 2016 . .... 263 Introduction Refugee Routes Connecting the Displaced and the Emplaced Vanessa Agnew Driven from home by war, persecution, climate change, and poverty, unprece- dented numbers of people are now on the move (UNHCR, 2017). This is gener- ating social, cultural, and political challenges and raising questions about the re- sponses of liberal democracies. Although globally insignificant as a refugee host country, Australia is key to debates over migration because of its ‘Pacific Solution’, a model of border externalization, incarceration, ‘offshore processing’, and third country resettlement (Neumann, 2004). The model has been strongly criticized on legal and humanitarian grounds, and the returning of asylum seekers deemed a violation of internationally ratified human rights (Klepp, 2010; Neilson, 2010; Eu- ropean Parliament Briefing, 2016). Nonetheless, border externalization, incarcer- ation, and offshore processing are approaches increasingly adopted by European and other countries confronted by arrivees whose existence is untenable at home (Ayre, 2016; Sigona, 2018). In future, ever more people fleeing conflict, poverty, and environmental degradation will look to high-income countries for refuge (Frelick et al., 2016). The predicted tenfold increase in climate migrants alone has powerful implications for transforming social and political processes for coming generations (Brown, 2008). Better understanding refugeeism and forced migration and devel- oping informed and sustainable responses are thus matters of profound global ur- gency (Betts and Collier, 2017). State responses are often justified by invoking historical examples of migra- tion, even though – or perhaps because – refugeeism is neither well historicized nor globally conceptualized. European historiography, for example, has only re- cently begun to acknowledge Europe’s migration past and scholars still tend to emphasize regional rather than pan-European perspectives (Sturm-Martin, 2012; van Mol and de Valk, 2016). Refugees and asylum seekers have not just been ig- nored, silenced, or forgotten by mainstream historians (Marfleet, 2007), but, as Jérôme Elie (2014) argues, they have been systematically excluded from the histor- ical record (p. 30). This contrasts with a public discourse that explicitly links the current experiences of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa to those of Europeans displaced in large numbers by the Second World War and other con- 18 Vanessa Agnew flicts. In Germany specifically, responses to refugees during the ‘long summer of migration’ were interpreted as acts of historical reconciliation and as an exempli- fication of the country’s ‘welcome culture’ (Mayer, 2016; Hamann and Karakayali, 2016; Yurdakul and zur Nieden, 2018). Yet growing populism and pressure within the European Union to apply the ‘Pacific Solution’ to the Mediterranean suggest that this historical lens is being eroded. A notion of Fortress Europe is increasingly shaping public attitudes and state policy. The question arises, then, as to how refugees, exiles, and ‘irregular migrants’ might be inserted in collective historical consciousness. Central to this is the idea of place and its associated possibilities for remembering. The lieu de mémoire – some- thing Pierre Nora (1989) calls a site ‘where memory crystalizes and secretes itself’ – enables a society in flux to remember and preserve what is important to it (p. 7). Since asylum seekers and refugees lack collective sites for remembering, they are often concealed from wider public view (Evershed et al. , 2016; Rodriguez et al. , 2017). Their expulsion from home can thus be considered simultaneously an expul- sion from the ‘land of memory’ (Creet and Kitzmann, 2014). Prevented from cross- ing borders, would-be asylum seekers are subject to a temporality that cleaves them from both the past and the future (Neilson, 2010). Refugees have neither time nor place. This has implications not only for the displaced but also for potential hosts. Being ‘out of time’ affects common understandings of history as teleological; being ‘out of place’ precludes the possibility of regarding history as ‘double-sided’, an ex- change between those who are already there and those who arrive (Dening, 2002). We can conclude then that there is a pressing need for incorporating refugee and asylum-seeker memories into existing historical narratives. Not only must such a retelling include the experiences of those considered ‘worthy’ refugees and ‘regular’ permanent migrants, but it must also provide an account of those deemed ‘unwor- thy’ and ‘irregular’, those who are unwelcomed, detained, or turned away. Docu- menting past and present refugee flight, and identifying and interpreting sites of refugee remembrance, will create a richer picture of the ways in which endogenous histories are, and always have been, imbricated with those of others. If transnational historicization is one means of addressing the growing crisis of human mobility, another involves scrutinizing the mechanisms of state control that increasingly regulate who may belong and who may not. The concentration of asylum seekers and refugees on islands and in camps and liminal housing, along with the tightening of borders, means that refugeeism is subject to selective invisi- bility, on the one hand, and hyper-surveillance in border zones, on the other (Tazz- ioli, 2016, p. 11). This invisibility/surveillance nexus emerges as one of the dominant structures of state control. In response, scholars and activists call for what Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani refer to as a ‘disobedient gaze’ that directs attention away from the ‘illegality’ of border crossings to focus instead on state violations of refugee rights (2013, p. 289). This shift will allow the border – like the refugee route Refugee Routes 19 – to be thought of as a potential site of encounter (Parker and Vaughan-Williams, 2016) as well as one of investigation, redistributive justice, and memorialization. Notions of invisibility, containment, and disobedience find expression in De- barati Sanyal’s contribution to Refugee Routes . In the Calais ‘Jungle’, Sanyal says, the irregular migrant is configured as ‘bare life’, someone whose existence in the French camp ‘is rendered invisible and inaudible’. In an unfortunate coincidence of humanitarianism and securitarianism, the irregular migrant is seen as ‘a body to be saved, contained, policed, moved around, encamped, kept out, or expelled; in short, as a body to be managed’. Claudia Tazreiter, likewise, focuses on the prob- lem of invisibility, highlighting the fact that Australia’s repressive refugee policies are upheld and enforced through statutes that, on the one hand, uphold human- itarian efforts to prevent deaths at sea, and, on the other, criminalize reporting about inhuman conditions in detention centres. This ‘veil of secrecy’, she argues, is countered by the clandestine efforts of journalists, medical practitioners, human rights advocates, artists, and detainees themselves. The Iranian writer Behrouz Boochani, whose 2018 memoir was composed in secret via text message, for ex- ample, describes mental ill health, self-harm, and suicide as common responses to the systemic human rights violations perpetrated against asylum seekers and refugees at the offshore processing centre on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. Voicing refugee concerns and bringing human rights violations to public attention will, Tazreiter argues, help counter state-directed efforts to ‘disappear’ refugees and asylum seekers. In this vein, Refugee Routes argues that it is possible to counter invisibility with disobedient looking, silence with telling, extirpation with surviving, inequity with redressing, displacement with re-rooting. While the stakes are different for host communities and those displaced by need, fear, hope, or decree, commonalities may be forged through storytelling, researching, archiving, reenacting, and memo- rializing. Social scientists David Benček and Julia Strasheim, in their work on xeno- phobia in Germany, suggest that anti-refugee violence is correlated to public opin- ion on refugees (2016, p. 10; see also Koopmans and Olzak, 2004). To shift public opinion, then, is to take a step towards creating a society that is more accommodat- ing to newcomers and the needy. Since participation in a society’s memory culture confers the legitimacy of belonging, the possibilities for social participation and a sense of belonging are correspondingly curtailed when access to memory culture is restricted (Glynn and Kleist, 2012). From this we can conclude that developing a commemorative culture around refugeehood has implications for changing cul- tural attitudes and for countering what has been described as the pervasive ‘moral panic’ about refugees (Baumann, 2016, p. 1). Culture is made in motion, as anthropologist James Clifford insists (1997, p. 3). This puts the refugee route and its unruly exchanges at the centre of cultural pro- duction. Rather than being seen as the agent of crisis and threat, the refugee can