Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780823233557)

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.

Author: April Shemak
ISBN-10: 0823233553
ISBN-13: 9780823233557
Publisher: American Literatures Initiative
Language: English
Published: 12/01/2010
Pages: 320
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.25lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 1.20d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 12/10/2010 pg. 16
Choice 01/01/2012
Reference and Research Bk News 02/01/2011 pg. 235