Decolonizing Refugee Studies: Literary Interventions and the Afterlives of Imperial Modernity

Abida Younas, University of Warwick

This paper interrogates the Eurocentric foundations of refugee studies by advancing a decolonial critique grounded in contemporary refugee literature. While dominant approaches in refugee studies frame displacement as a humanitarian crisis to be managed by global institutions, they often obscure the historical and geopolitical conditions—colonialism, imperial warfare, and uneven development—that produce forced migration. Building on postcolonial and critical refugee studies, this paper argues that refugee governance remains embedded within the afterlives of imperial modernity, where protection is structured through asymmetries of power, knowledge, and representation. The paper contends that the North-centric orientation of refugee studies reproduces a “charity framework” that individualizes suffering while displacing accountability from the states and global systems implicated in refugee production. Within this framework, refugees are positioned as objects of care and gratitude rather than as political subjects shaped by historical violence. Against this, refugee literature emerges as a critical site for decolonizing knowledge production. Through close reading of No Land to Light On by Yara Zgheib and The Haunting of Hajji Hotak by Jamil Jan Kochai, the paper demonstrates how literary narratives reframe displacement as structurally embedded within global modernity rather than as an external crisis. These texts foreground war, surveillance, and bureaucratic governance as interconnected processes that shape refugee subjectivity across temporal and spatial scales. By situating refugee experience within histories of empire and global inequality, the paper argues that refugee literature not only critiques dominant humanitarian discourse but also offers a methodological intervention into refugee studies itself. In doing so, it contributes to broader efforts to decenter modernity by rethinking displacement as central to its formation rather than peripheral to it.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 153. Colonialism, Decolonization, and Racial Capitalism