This panel, “Writing Oneself Into Existence: Refugee Narratives and the Poetics of Recognition,” asks how refugee narratives reclaim legibility, recognition, and personhood in the wake of political erasure. Taking up Vinh Nguyen’s concept of “refugeetude,” the session focuses on literary texts that generate forms of narrative repair for people too often reduced to legal categories, humanitarian scripts, or nationalist anxieties. Across distinct geographies and temporalities—Partition-era India and Pakistan, contemporary Australia and the United States, and twenty-first-century migration from Africa to Europe—the panelists examine how fiction writes refugee subjects into existence when political systems and cultural institutions render them manageable, abstract, or silent.

At stake in this panel is a basic but urgent question: what does literature make possible when “the refugee” has become such a flattened and overdetermined figure? The label does reductive work, and refugee narratives are too often expected to deliver authenticity, gratitude, suffering, and moral clarity in recognizable proportions. This panel resists those expectations by foregrounding writing that engages narrative repair. Madness, silence, haunting, fragmentation, and polyvocality are used by the writers here to register the psychic and social afterlives of migration. Just as importantly, they expose the limits of recognition itself, showing that refugee lives do not become legible simply because they are narrated.

That intervention is especially pressing now. Anti-immigration and anti-refugee rhetoric continues to harden across national contexts but so has the timidity of the Anglophone publishing industry. In the wake of controversies over voice and authenticity, the result has not been greater bravery or openness around refugee narratives but, too often, a retreat from them. That loss matters. It narrows the field of what can be published, taught, and discussed at precisely the moment when writing oneself into existence is both more difficult and more necessary. This panel takes that contradiction seriously. It asks what refugee fiction can do when the available language is inadequate, when institutions reward legibility but not complexity, and when fiction bears so much of the burden of making displaced lives apprehensible.

Megan Butler's paper, “The Ghosts of Arrival: Haunting and ‘Refugeetude’ after Displacement,” focuses on E. Lily Yu’s novel On Fragile Waves and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story, “Black-Eyed Women.” She argues that ghosts make visible the lingering psychic and social conditions of displacement after arrival. In both texts, resettlement in Australia or the United States does not end the refugee journey. Trauma persists in spectral form, shaping memory, survival, and belonging long after arrival. Haunting becomes a mode of narrative repair in these works, one that allows refugee subjects to emerge not as passive victims of history but as split, complex figures negotiating recognition in the aftermath of violence.

Fatima Z. Naveed’s paper, “The Madness and Silence of Partition: Refugeetude in ‘Toba Tek Singh’ and ‘Lajwanti,’” turns to the Partition of India in 1947 to examine how fiction restores agency to subjects whom history often renders legible only as statistics. Reading Saadat Hasan Manto and Rajinder Singh Bedi together, Naveed shows how these stories generate narrative repair through sharply different formal strategies. In “Toba Tek Singh,” madness becomes a performative refusal of nationalist categorization. In “Lajwanti,” silence reveals the gendered limits of rehabilitation and recognition. Together, the stories demonstrate how literary narrative can register psychic and social fracture without reproducing the terms of administrative or patriarchal erasure.

Penny Vlagopoulos’s “‘Desires, Dreams, Inner Life’: Narrative Hospitality in Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Silence of the Choir” broadens the panel’s scope by asking what it would mean to read refugee fiction hospitably. Focusing on Sarr’s polyvocal novel of African migrants arriving in a fictional Sicilian village, Vlagopoulos argues that the novel’s formal fragmentation refuses any single, containable refugee story. Instead, it opens a space in which fiction does the difficult work that policy and public discourse cannot: making refugee experience legible without domesticating its complexity.

Across multiple literary traditions, regions, and historical moments, the panel traces reclaimed personhood against systems designed to deny it. The panel includes scholars across career stages and a range of texts and locations that are deliberately broad yet tightly focused on the relation between literary form, political erasure, and recognition. The session will feature three 15-minute papers leaving at least 20 minutes for discussion. As presider, I will invite the audience to think not only about what these texts reveal, but also about what it means to read, teach, and circulate refugee narratives in a moment when they are both urgently needed and increasingly constrained.