The emplacement of the displaced: representations of refugee homemaking in the UK

Abstract

This thesis examines representations of refugees in the UK. It focuses on how contemporary narratives of refugee homemaking disrupt prominent paradigms of asylum seekers. This thesis differentiates itself from generalisations of homes as places that are exclusively safe for their dwellers and argues that home is a potential place of belonging, rather than intrinsically possessing such power. The thesis opens with an analysis of the significance of photographs in generating this paradigm and consolidating ‘the refugee crises’ as a visual crisis. Each chapter then analyses a genre of text that challenges this depiction through an emphasis on homemaking. Chapter 1 examines the representations of the loss of home and homemaking in Mariem Omari’s play The Trojans (2019). Through an analysis of the play’s use of staging, script, sound, and narratives of homemaking, I argue that the play stretches beyond the confines of the tragedy genre and avoids framing refugees entirely through the paradigm of suffering. Chapter 2 focuses on the precarity of refugee homemaking in Remi Weekes’ horror film His House (2020). The analysis examines how the film’s use of sound, script, and camera work reanimates the depictions of suffering refugees that dominate the news media in a way that reframes such tropes to acknowledge the power dynamics and hostility that dictate refugee resettlement. Chapter 3 scrutinises the representation of refugee homes as spaces of agency and recreation in Nisreen Kanbour’s cookbook A Taste of Home (2020) and Helen Taylor’s ethnographic study Refugees and the Meaning of Home (2015). The chapter examines the use of images, refugee accounts, and descriptions of the sensory aspects of cooking. I argue that although the texts do not reiterate compassion-fatigued images of suffering, their romanticisation of refugee homemaking risks obscuring resettlement as a process unaffected by the UK’s hostile environment.
Through its focus on case studies that represent refugees through the textual, visual, and sensual, the thesis emphasises the potential power of amalgamating these representational methods to challenge dehumanising depictions of refugees in dominant discourse. By analysing how the refugee experience of displacement and resettlement is represented in underexplored genres and forms such as dramatic tragedy, horror film, cookbook, and ethnographic study, the thesis exposes methods of reframing the UK news media’s hyperfocus on refugee suffering. Through textual and critical discourse analysis, I find that homemaking narratives complicate—rather than counter—discourses of suffering and welcoming. The focus on the narrative and image in the case studies reveals that ‘homemaking’ is an ambivalent idea within refugee discourse that is deployed to variable and powerful affect—sometimes complicit with a romanticisation of refugeedom, and—even within the same text—sometimes in ways that combat compassion fatigue by demystifying the refugee experience.

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ORCID for Marion Demossier: orcid.org/0000-0001-6075-1461

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