This dissertation addresses how the politics of representation and social imaginaries have impacted books by and about refugees migrating to the West since the late 1990s. Beginning with three popular publications from 2006/2007 and moving through today, I argue that the genre of modern refugee literature that coalesced around narratives of flight and a sympathetic appeal has been transformed by Western conventions of co-authorship and demands for authenticity. The result is a near vacuum of novels about recent refugee experiences even as population models for the next twenty five years predict an exponential growth in human migration due to climate change and political instability. To understand this shift, I consider the American publishing industry’s role (and responsibility) in national conversations about migration and nation building by reading refugee novels and nonfiction through lenses of sympathy, trauma-centered care, and humanitarian ethics. Using the work of political scientists and sociologists from Hannah Arendt to Liisa Malkki to Didier Fassin who critique humanitarian intervention as a method of engagement that relates to people who suffer but does not necessarily put an end to suffering or even establish systems that will, I ask what sort of transformational reading is expected from its readers and what sort of futures—both intimate and societal—books about refugees might help Western readers imagine and enact.
This project also tracks the limits of sympathy as a reader response—despite its role as an authenticating feature of the genre—and follows how history and politics transform what is acceptable for publication. Chapter One presents three books that give voice to a new generation of refugees through layers of publishing and reviewing patterns that, I argue, norm readers to look for certain narratives within refugee stories in much the same way that the process of seeking asylum norms refugees to tell immigration agents the stories of their lives the agents want to hear. Chapter Two interrogates co-authorship and authenticity and discusses how both are bound up in the dangerous process of seeking refuge. Chapter Three centers Behrouz Boochani’s account of seeking asylum in Australia and explains how he marks a shift in the genre by including politics, history, and a demand for Western accountability. Chapter Four looks at texts engaged in genre experimentation that circumvent questions of voice and authenticity and open new narrative possibilities for refugees. My research shows how practices within the publishing industry both produce and replicate narratives that obstruct the fullness of refugee voices and limit readers’ ability or interest in questioning their involvement in the narratives that compel their sympathy.