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Postcolonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law

Online ISBN:
9781846317132
Print ISBN:
9781846314803
Publisher:
Liverpool University Press
Book

Postcolonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law

Published:
24 February 2011
Online ISBN:
9781846317132
Print ISBN:
9781846314803
Publisher:
Liverpool University Press

Abstract

This book is concerned with asylum as a key emerging postcolonial field. Through an engagement with asylum legislation, legal theory and ethics, it argues that the exclusionary culture of host nations casts asylum seekers as contemporary incarnations of the infrahuman object of colonial sovereignty. The book includes readings of the work of asylum seekers, postcolonial authors and filmmakers, including J. M. Coetzee, Caryl Phillips, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Leila Aboulela, Stephen Frears, Pawel Pawlikowski, and Michael Winterbottom. These readings are framed by the work of postcolonial theorists (Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul Gilroy, Achille Mbembe), as well as other influential thinkers (Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière, Emmanuel Levinas, Étienne Balibar, Zygmunt Bauman), in order to institute what Spivak calls a ‘step beyond’ postcolonial studies; one that carries with it the insights and limitations of the discipline as it looks to new ways for postcolonial studies to engage with the world.

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