Tobias Heinrich

The Placing of Displaced Lives: Refugee Narratives

The refugee crisis facing Europe involves millions of people in dangerous forms of transit. Displaced, dispossessed, and traumatized, refugees leave behind lives they know to face uncertain futures. Media reports refer to “waves” of people arriving; in this sea of troubles, all have stories to tell. From a life-writing perspective, these stories raise urgent questions: What forms of listening are meaningful to those telling? What pressures on identity do refugee experiences foreground? What contexts affect refugee stories—often shaped in relation to digital impressions about destinations—and what must refugees navigate in order to reach safety? What languages, literal and figurative, accompany their transition from one life to another? How does the verbal and visual language around refugees contribute to seeing them in negative ways, or not seeing them at all, or hearing them in negative ways? How do hostile or indifferent discourses compound the difficulties refugees face in reaching safety, making new lives, and healing from trauma? How can the academic community help narratives and personal accounts be received with attention, care, respect, and constructive action? How do we sharpen and apply the intellectual tools of life writing to assist people whose lives have been forced into upheaval? What do we learn from the stories of refugees that changes our thinking so as to prevent and remedy more human tragedies? What sorts of listening do refugee stories need? What narrative forms besides stories can communicate experience and restore subjectivity? It is questions like these that our Forum on Refugee Narratives addresses. Many of the contributions deal with the current events in Europe, but stories of forced migration and refuge from and in Africa, the Americas, and Asia help to shed light on the topic’s global perspective. A common motif that binds the eight contributions to this forum together is the tension between the collective character of the term “refugee,” currently assigned to more than 21 million people by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR), and each individual fate—each unique story of plight and departure, of hardship and transit, of fear and hope. It is this contradiction between the subjects of unique stories and the objects of