During the Autumn Term 2016, the School of Arts will host two Bloomsbury Research Lectures on topics related to contemporary literature.
Thursday 17th November 2016
7:40pm-9pm
Julia Bell (Birkbeck), ‘The Territory of the Strange Room’
How does a writer find and define their territory? Before this lecture, please read Damon Galgut’s short 'novel' In A Strange Room and Zadie Smith’s Essay ‘Fail Better’.
Thursday 1st December 2016
6:00-7:30pm
Agnes Woolley (RHUL), Literature, Law and the 'Asylum Story'
In a moment of anxiety over the meaning and scope of citizenship comparable to that of the post-War period – and facing a ‘refugee crisis’ of similar scale – an investigation of the means by which asylum protection is constituted by and enacted through narrative forms is long overdue. The entanglement of literary and legal technologies in the asylum decision-making process as it operates today in legal, advocacy and creative circles, excludes asylum seekers from incorporation as rights-bearing individuals if they do not conform to a particular narrative of persecution. This paper will analyse the procedural characteristics of the asylum decision-making process, which produces what I call the ‘asylum story’: an idealized version of refugeehood on which the civic incorporation of the asylum seeker depends and which circulates in a narrative economy that sets the terms for the enunciation of refugee experience. It considers how the notion of a discoverable truth has inflected literary engagements with asylum, which are beset by the same anxieties around veracity and authenticity endemic to the legal process of decision-making on asylum. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story ‘The American Embassy’ from her 2009 collection The Thing Around Your Neck offers an insight into the narrative instabilities of the asylum determination process, highlighting the ways in which those international institutions designed to protect human rights continue to be deeply implicated in regimes of truth which regulate upon whom they may be conferred.
Dr Agnes Woolley is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research interests are in contemporary and postcolonial literature, theatre and film, with a focus on concepts of migration and diaspora. She is the author of Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) and has published extensively on asylum, climate change and contemporary literature. She is also Chair of a London drop-in centre for asylum seekers and refugees and a regular contributor to openDemocracy, reporting on migration issues.
The Bloomsbury Research lectures are organized by Dr Ana Parejo Vadillo.
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