Asylum speakers [[electronic resource] ] : Caribbean refugees and testimonial discourse / / April Shemak

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910458212103321
• Autore: Shemak April Ann
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: New York, : Fordham University Press, 2010
• ISBN: 0-8232-4119-X; 1-283-29712-4; 9786613297129; 0-8232-3735-4; 0-8232-3357-X
• Edizione: [1st ed.]
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (ix, 310 p. ) : ill.
• Collana: American Literatures Initiative
• Disciplina: 810.9/3526914
• Soggetti: American literature - Caribbean American authors - History and criticism; Refugees in literature; Emigration and immigration in literature; Refugees - Caribbean Area - Social conditions; Refugees - United States - Social conditions; Electronic books.
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Poetics of Hospitality: Refugee, Migrant, Testimony -- 1. Inter-dictions and Limbo Citizens: Haitian Boat Refugee Narratives -- 2. False Witnessing: U.S. Coast Guard Photography of Haitian Boat Refugees -- 3. Silent Subjectivities: Testimony and Haitian Labor Refugees -- 4. Corporate Containment: Refugee Seafarers on the Seas of Transnational Labor -- 5. Crossing the Threshold of Asylum: Dominican and Cuban (Post)Refugee Narratives -- Epilogue: Diverted Testimonies: New World Refugees in the Twenty-First Century -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: Offering the first interdisciplinary study of refugees in the Caribbean, Central America, and the United States, Asylum Speakers relates current theoretical debates about hospitality and cosmopolitanism to the actual ; conditions of refugees. In doing so, the author weighs the questions of "truth value" associated with various modes of witnessing to explore the function of testimonial discourse in constructing refugee subjectivity in New World cultural and political formations. By examining literary works by such writers as Edwidge Danticat, Nikòl Payen, Kamau Brathwaite, Francisco Goldman, Julia Alvarez, Ivonne Lamazares, and Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, theoretical work by Jacques Derrida, Edouard Glissant, and Wilson Harris, as well as human rights documents, government documents, photography, and historical studies, Asylum Speakers constructs a complex picture of New World refugees that expands current discussions of diaspora and migration, demonstrating that the peripheral nature of refugee testimonial narratives requires us to reshape the boundaries of U.S. ethnic and postcolonial studies.