The ongoing human tragedy of the war in Ukraine, which has now become the largest military combat operation in Europe since World War II, brings forward sobering reminders of patterns of disruption that have characterized much of twentieth and twenty-first century global history. This panel will focus on texts from different cultures that center on the syndrome of displacement, which has recently victimized huge numbers of Syrians, Central Americans, and currently, Ukrainians, displaced by the millions from their homeland by Russian aggression. The acceptance of refugees in several neighboring countries has been welcome, but the displaced have also been rejected and condemned, by both other national governments and elements of angry anti-immigrant populations.
A leading experts on the subject, Katrina Powell, will focus on collective resistance through embodied narrative, providing examples from a variety of global displaced populations. She will examine literary responses to institutional narratives of displacement, focusing on the poetics of displacement present in life narratives, testimonials, poetry, film, and fiction that speak back to monolithic portrayals of the displaced. Using examples such as Jean Arasanayagam’s poetry (Sri Lanka), Larissa Sansour’s film “In The Future They Ate From The Finest Porcelain,” (Palestine), and Nyadol Nyuon’s oral history (Sudan), she will highlight narratives that challenge enumerations contained in ledger books, revealing the complexity of experience behind those numbers. She will argue that a poetics of displacement subverts the victim trope and asks us to consider interiority, temporality, fragmentations, landscape ruins, and embodiment as key to understanding the transnational, historical, generational, and cyclical impacts of forced displacement.
Building on Powell’s work, Katherine Henninger will explore rhetorics of displacement as they circulate far from institutions or battlefront, in the domestic fields of the United States as “host” to refugees. First published in 1954, Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The Displaced Person” addresses contemporaneous and contemporary U.S. anxieties around Russian aggression, destabilizing racial hierarchies, immigration, technology and the pressures of capitalism, and the presumed moral imperatives of global power. Images of Holocaust—particularly visualized narratives of bodily fragmentation and death—haunt the psyches of O’Connor’s Georgia characters upon the arrival of a Polish refugee family, signifying a threat of contagion, associative murderousness, and the violence of modernity. Henninger will demonstrate that for O’Connor, rhetorics of displacement pertain less to war’s refugees than to the rhetors themselves: their fear of losing what little power they have under racialized capitalism. Here, narratives of displacement meant to smooth hegemony reflexively deconstruct in face of the “extra,” un-balancing presence of the displaced. This disruption, “The Displaced Person” suggests, affords possibilities: an opportunity for illumination, to think through the “unthought known” of identity and power to move toward connection and justice; or retrenchment into greater violence and, ultimately, self-destruction.
The third presenter, John Wharton Lowe, will examine Cristina García’s fascinating novel, Here in Berlin, which concerns the massive displacements of World War II in Germany. The novel features interviews conducted by a Cuban “Visitor” who is intent on finding new meaning in the memories of the elderly survivors of post-war culture. The Visitor becomes a kind of literary flaneur, criss-crossing Berlin, sometimes randomly, ferreting out stories while taking in the monumental views, but always factoring in the tragic history the ruins represent. She clearly sees the sharp dividing line between National Socialism and the war’s aftermath as akin to the cultural divide Castro’s Revolution created in 1959. Both events displaced people from every type, and in the case of Cuba, led to a global diaspora. While ruins in Germany had been cleared away by 2013, they reappear again and again, not only in the photos and films the Visitor views, but almost always in the accounts she hears of the post-war decade from inhabitants of nursing homes, or elders visiting their dead in cemeteries. Werner Sollors, by contrast, provides an absorbing history of life in the ruins, and the slow recovery that is partly facilitated by forgetting the trauma of war and displacement. He includes a moving set of memories from his own family’s tragic displacement from Silesia into West Germany, a fate suffered by millions of ethnic Germans who were exiled from former Germany cultures in Poland and other countries. This paper will compare and contrast the ways in which Sollors’s non-fiction and García’s fiction depict trauma, displacement, and the uses of forgetting.
This session’s three fifteen minute papers will be followed by ample time for discussion, and will interrogate how displacements caused by global conflicts have been recorded and conceptualized by a variety of writers and thinkers.