Re-visioning Refugees: South Asian Interventions

full name / name of organization: 
Non - guarnateed panel for MLA 2017, sponsored by South Asian Literary Association
contact email: 

Re-visioning Refugees: South Asian Interventions
The 1951 Refugee Convention in Geneva, restricts the term "refugees" to only those who leave their country of nationality out of a 'well-founded fear of being persecuted'—and persecuted 'for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular group or political opinion,' By this legal definition, Syrian refugees would be categorized as economic migrants and not refugees. While ethicists point to the United States' moral obligation for altruism in being partly responsible for conditions leading to the current refugee crisis, political responses have ranged from calls to halt the acceptance of refugees to creation of databases to monitor all Muslims in the U.S. This panel seeks to explore South Asian responses, through inter disciplinary frameworks, to the cultural politics of the refugee crisis. How does the present global crisis produce revisions of theoretical categories like the 'migrant,' 'refugee' and 'exile'? How do memory, historical trauma of the Indian Partition, and the more recent racial profiling of South Asians since 9/11 influence this discourse and create opportunities for cross border and inter-ethnic solidarities? Papers may include but are not limited to construction of the refugee in literature, visual arts, and public discourse, ethical debates about the refugee crisis, and activist interventions.
Please send300 word abstract to Lopamudra Basu basul@uwstout.edu by March 11, 2016.