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Journal of Refugee Studies Advance Access originally published online on July 29, 2009
Journal of Refugee Studies 2009 22(3):257-282; doi:10.1093/jrs/fep021
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© The Author [2009]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

This article appears in the following Journal of Refugee Studies issue: Special Issue: Representation and Displacement [View the issue table of contents]

Illegible Humanity: The Refugee, Human Rights, and the Question of Representation

Bishupal Limbu

Program in Comparative Literary Studies, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208

bishupal{at}gmail.com

Given the restrictive discursive field in which the refugee as object of representation and knowledge is constructed, this paper argues that it is necessary to find alternative narratives that provide different perspectives on the refugee experience. This process involves interrogating the very notion of the human and of humanity in the most powerful discourse currently available to make claims on behalf of the refugee: that of human rights and humanitarianism. To be a refugee is to lose certain rights, and in the absence of these rights a person is not recognizable as such and thus becomes socially irrelevant, devoid of significance, and meaningless to the prevailing schemes of representation. If this kind of social death is reserved for someone who is less than or other than human, where do we situate the refugee? This paper argues that we cannot take for granted the transparency and self-evidence of the human in ‘human rights’ when figures of apparent humanity such as the refugee remain illegible in the conceptual and representational scheme at hand.

Key Words: representation • cosmopolitanism • hospitality • human rights • the human • social death • community • ethics • literature and politics

MS received December 1, 2008 ; revised MS received May 1, 2009
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