Representing refugees in the Indian diaspora, Sunjeev Sahota's The Year of the Runaways (2015)

Wilson, J. M. (2017) Representing refugees in the Indian diaspora, Sunjeev Sahota's The Year of the Runaways (2015). Invited Keynote presented to: 1st International Literary Conference: The Cultures of New India, Sri Ramswaroop Memorial University, Lucknow, India, 17-18 February 2017.

The files below are currently restricted to repository staff only.

They may be awaiting processing or under a publisher's embargo.

Items under embargo will be available for download from the date noted.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Invited Keynote)
Abstract:	In the 21st century’s climate of globalization and mobilisation, refugees, asylum seekers and illegal immigrants are the most vulnerable of the transient groups of the diaspora. According to Agamben the refugee is ‘the limit concept’. Subject to surveillance, social exclusion and dehumanising practices due to their illegitimacy and non- citizenship status, refugees and illegal migrants have liminal lives. As border subjects who inhabit peripheral zones of occupation, enduring racial discrimination, social and financial insecurity, and poverty they demonstrate distinctive subaltern identities. Identities become destabilised and transformed under these harsh and unpredictable conditions of survivorship, and representations of such marginal groups pose problems of interpretation. Narrative accounts by and about refugees and asylum seekers require different forms of understanding; this includes their modes of production and reception as the new area of poverty studies suggests. Should their stories be read as ‘victim’ narratives requiring empathy, or as narratives of resistance and self assertion, negotiating new spaces outside the home nation, instigating more hospitable acts in the host society, and hence potential agency? Questions like these lie behind this paper which will focus on The Year of the Runaways, the Booker Prize-nominated novel by Sunjeev Sahota (2015), which consists of the interlocking stories of a group of ‘runaways’ from India who seek a new life in England, and who develop a subaltern-cosmopolitan diasporic subjectivity out of “poverty, prejudice and unemployment”. In discussing how the genre of the novel creates greater imaginative scope in representing the refugee/illegal immigrant, the paper will take into account the impact on the global marketplace of Sahota’s novel in being nominated for a major literary award. What new possibilities for representations of the Indian diaspora in England and elsewhere, are suggested by this accolade?
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Refugees, asylum seekeers, Sunjeev Sahota, The Year of the Runaways, poverty, precarity, unemployment, Indian diaspora, victim, agency
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PR English literature > PR6100 2001-
Creators:	Wilson, Janet M
Faculties, Divisions and Institutes:	University Faculties, Divisions and Research Centres - OLD > Research Centre > Centre for Critical and Creative Writing Research Centres > Centre for Critical and Creative Writing
Date:	17 February 2017
Date Type:	Publication
Event Title:	1st International Literary Conference: The Cultures of New India
Event Dates:	17-18 February 2017
Event Location:	Sri Ramswaroop Memorial University, Lucknow, India
Event Type:	Conference
Language:	English
Status:	Published / Disseminated
URI:	http://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/id/eprint/9490

Actions (login required)

Edit Item

Altmetric