The (Re)Construction of Refugeedom: Narrating Refugee Agency in Alameddine and El Akkad

Abstract

Where mass media falls short, contemporary refugee literature intervenes in its attempt to negotiate a genuine and faithful literary representation of the refugee. The purpose of this study is to show how refugee literature challenges the notion of the ‘real’ and ‘authentic’ story by employing narratological and metafictional techniques that, despite disrupting the boundary separating fiction from reality, create a necessary intersection of the legal and the literary aspects of refugee storytelling.

This thesis explores how the use of literary code-switching in contemporary refugee literature—that is both metafictional and experimental—reconstructs the image of the refugee. By conducting close readings of Rabih Alameddine’s The Wrong End of the Telescope and Omar El Akkad’s What Strange Paradise, both published in 2021, this research utilizes sociological, narratological, linguistic, and metafictional frameworks to analyze the construction of refugee characters as active subjects. My analysis reveals, in the form of an argument, that in their attempts to represent an agentic refugee, both Alameddine and El Akkad demonstrate a major struggle in refugee literature to close the habitus of difference separating the refugee from the Western reader.

This research expands on refugee discourse while incorporating numerous disciplines that encompass both legal and literary frameworks of storytelling. It fills in the gaps in the existing scholarship not only on the novels themselves by Alameddine and El Akkad but also on the analysis of experimental metafiction and Arabic code-switching in diasporic contemporary Arab American literature.