Techfugees : Neoliberal Technological Erasure Of the Refugee Figure in Anglophone Narratives

AlAmmouri, Bayan and Bradley, Arthur (2024) Techfugees : Neoliberal Technological Erasure Of the Refugee Figure in Anglophone Narratives. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

This study focuses on the figure of the techfugee—the technologically precarious twenty-first century refugee in a globalized market space—in anglophone narratives, both fictional and nonfictional, written during the past decade. While current theoretical conversations within the field of refugee studies often focus on identity dysmorphia, spatial and temporal movements of the displaced, and/or the socioeconomic adversities that refugees undergo and sometimes, arguably, cause, I will scrutinize what I call the “technological erasure” of the displaced—a biopolitical and topographical dispositif that includes refugees through their very exclusion. I will rely on Heidegger, Stiegler, and Agamben to showcase the human need for technology and then integrate the works of Foucault and Wendy Brown on the biopolitics of the homo oeconomicus in the neoliberal turn to be able to closely read the representation of the effects of technology on the twenty-first century refugee in the narrative form. To summarize my argument, I contend that technological erasure has three forms. First, it denies the displaced figure access to the technological tools that enable and define citizenship—which thereby renders refugee camps technological “deserts.” Second, it is employed against the refugee figure when they become embedded and captured within technology like cellphones, computer screens, and drones which causes a kind of social or physical death by data. Finally and most importantly, I argue the first two forms of erasure produce a third one, what I call refugees’ self-erasure which is analyzed as the sole form of resistance to state technological erasure that refugees rely on when they shed technology to prevent trackability. Moreover, the anglophone narratives this thesis will re-read, are approached as case studies that critique technological erasure through the representation of the detrimental effects of technological precarity, and at the same time they are analyzed as literary technological forms that could possibly technologically erase the refugee figure. The narratives this dissertation closely analyzes include memoirs, novels, graphic narratives, virtual reality experiences, video games, and art forms: Aeham Ahmad’s memoir The Pianist from Syria (2019), Gulwali Passarlay’s memoir The Lightless Sky (2017), Fatima Bhutto’s virtual reality narrative “Flesh and Sand” (2018), UNHCR’s video game Against All Odds, some songs and paintings created by refugees, Atef Abu Saif’s memoir The Drone Eats with Me: A Gaza Diary (2015) and his most recent memoir Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide (2024), Mohsin Hamid’s novel Exit West (2017), Atia Abawi’s novel A Land of Permanent Goodbyes (2018), Onjali Q. Raúf’s novel The Boy At the Back of the Class (2018), Omar El Akkad’s novel What Strange Paradise (2021), Sharon Bala’s novel The Boat People (2018), Fatima Bhutto’s novel The Shadow of the Crescent Moon (2015), Omar Mohammad’s graphic memoir When Stars are Scattered (2020), Thi Bui’s graphic memoir The Best We Could Do (2017), Hamid Sulaiman’s graphic novel Freedom Hospital: A Syrian Story (2017), Samya Kullab’s graphic novel Escape from Syria (2017), and Pratap Chatterjee and Khalil Bendib’s graphic memoir Verax (2017).