Refugee Writing, Refugee History: Locating the Refugee Archive in the Making of a History of the Syrian War

Saber, Dima (2019) Refugee Writing, Refugee History: Locating the Refugee Archive in the Making of a History of the Syrian War. In: Refugee Imaginaries Research Across the Humanities. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 444-462. ISBN 9781474443197

[img]
Preview
Text
23_Saber&Long.pdf - Accepted Version

Download (2MB)

Abstract

Stemming from Philip Marfleet’s (2007; 2013; 2016) work on the relations between history, memory and displacement, this chapter takes as its point of departure that many major episodes of mass displacement have ‘disappeared’ from official history – from accounts that constitute what the Indian historian Gyanendra Pandey (2001) calls ‘national memory’. The same time, with the rise of new information and communication technologies, and with the democratization of image production and dissemination, new amateur and citizen stories of displacement have emerged, thus challenging dominant mainstream narratives, and constituting new repositories of shared memory across both time and space.

Building on the authors’ mapping of citizen-generated footage from Daraa, the city where the Syrian uprising began in 2011, this chapter attempts to re-situate personal accounts, histories and experiences of refugees themselves as important records of individual and collective social memories. It looks at their alternative digital archives as ‘historical markers of disruptive events’ (Papadopoulos, 2014), thus assessing the effects of digital technologies for rethinking the ways in which our societies remember and commemorate.

Finally, this chapter also locates the Daraa archive as a putative archive of refugee origins in productive and provocative relation to institutional archives, such as the repository of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In so doing, it considers the ethical challenges connected to the political economy of the archive, and to practices of archive creation, preservation and dissemination; from issues of ownership and indeed use of the ‘refugee archive’, to broader concerns of representation of and by the represented themselves.

Item Type: Book Section
Dates:
DateEvent
1 December 2019Published
Subjects: CAH24 - media, journalism and communications > CAH24-01 - media, journalism and communications > CAH24-01-05 - media studies
Divisions: Faculty of Business, Law and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences > Dept. Criminology and Sociology
Depositing User: Dima Saber
Date Deposited: 14 Jan 2020 11:21
Last Modified: 01 Dec 2022 03:00
URI: https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/8723

Actions (login required)

View Item View Item

Research

In this section...