Refugees Across the Arts – Global Cultures of Displacement in the 21st Century

Refugees Across the Arts offers an expansive, interdisciplinary exploration of contemporary refugee representation across literature, film, visual art, and performance. From Palestinian refugee poetics and Venezuelan diasporic anthologies, to animated documentaries, theatrical pedagogy, and arts-based solidarity initiatives in Warsaw, this collection highlights the global breadth and human complexity of artistic responses to displacement in the 21st century. Spanning multiple genres and cultural contexts, the essays foreground refugee voices and agency while challenging reductive tropes of victimhood and spectacle. Drawing on concepts such as “refugeedom,” “narrative displacement,” and “messy belongings,” the contributors interrogate dominant humanitarian discourses and expose the entanglements of aesthetics, ethics, and politics in refugee representation. The volume brings together scholars from across the Humanities to consider how storytelling – whether in writing, image, or performance – can bear witness, foster solidarity, and reclaim space for lives dislocated by conflict, crisis, and climate change. Refugees Across the Arts will be essential reading for scholars and students of refugee studies, migration and diaspora, contemporary world literature, film and visual culture, and the politics of representation. Katie Brown is an Associate Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at University of Exeter. Peter Sloane is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Buckingham.