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Narrating identity through the refugee story: on the self-made meaning of refugee in a U.S. metropolis Marina A. Amat American University Leesburg (United States) There are many strands of meaning to the refugee concept: refugee as legal term, as produced in the public imaginary, as object of knowledge, and as narrated by refugees who have passed through resettlement processing. These and other meanings of the refugee concept are dynamically engaged, interrelated, intersecting, and interwoven to produce a variegated fabric that hosts multiple interpretations as well as points of tension. In my research of refugees living in the Washington Metropolitan Area, I have investigated how the refugee defines herself or himself in resettlement: after having passed through resettlement processing, when confronted with competing refugee definitions produced by various U.S. publics, and while negotiating one’s past experience, current choices, and future imaginings, goals, and desires. I focus particular attention on the refugee concept as narrated by refugees who have passed through the U.S. refugee resettlement industry or “refugee industry.” The “refugee industry,” as I use the term, includes the international refugee regime, nation-state governments, state and local governments, local communities, and refugees themselves. Moreover, the refugee industry comprises the entire set of governing and normalizing practices—outside of and within U.S. borders—that are confronted by individuals who come to be called refugees in the U.S. Within the context of this tapestry of meaning, I consider the life story excerpts of a small set of refugees from Afghanistan, Bosnia, El Salvador, Iran, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Sudan who live in ethnically mixed communities across the Washington Metropolitan Area. Using a subset of the life story, the refugee story, as the analytic frame to interrogate the self-definitions of refugee, I consider personal refugee experiences specifically. Drawn from the reservoir of memory of personal refugee experience, I argue, there are discernable “refugee scripts” and “refugee narratives,” oral texts that are important sites to the investigation of the self-definitions of refugee. “Refugee scripts,” produced within the official spaces of the refugee industry and in collaboration with refugees, are the normative meanings of refugee that deracinate and dehistoricize the refugee. Prior to resettlement, the refugee is reduced to a category, objectified, and depersonalized. In resettlement, the refugee is neutralized, blanched, made palatable, and marketed by the U.S. refugee industry to the U.S. mainstream as another consumer: an economic type. “Refugee narratives,” produced by refugees who recollect and narrate an oral life story of refugee experience, counter the normative meanings of “refugee scripts,” inserting personal history, culture, language, memory, and imagining to the meaning of refugee. Outside of official spaces, the refugee navigates through social interactions in the U.S. and delivers a “refugee narrative” to a particular listener. In this paper, I consider a sampling of the thematic content of the “refugee narratives” I collected to offer a framework for understanding the self-made definitions of refugee. Ultimately, to delve into the self-definition of refugee is also to investigate how the meaning of refugee is constructed in the U.S. refugee industry and to query how this meaning relates to notions of being “American” in the U.S. About Marina A. Amat Marina A. Amat, MA, PhD, completed her doctorate in Anthropology from American University, Washington, D.C. Drawing from personal experience as an immigrant exiled to the U.S. from Cuba, Amat has focused much of her graduate career on people who have experienced displacement and the narratives they produce. For her dissertation research, Amat worked and volunteered in the refugee industry in the Washington Metropolitan Area. Trained in literary criticism, Spanish literature, and creative writing, Amat holds an MA in English from Trinity College, Hartford, CT, and remains interested in the stories and narratives of personal experience where cultures intersect. Amat is the founder of AMATEA, LLC, an interdisciplinary consulting firm guided by its mission to apply technology for social change. The firm employs research, evaluation, ethnographic fieldwork methods, and text analysis to offer an interdisciplinary approach to technology solutions, combining the thinking of technologists and anthropologists to create solutions that make sense to technology end-users. |
