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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper draws from ethnographic research on arts and displacement with Syrian migrants in Türkiye, Uyghurs in France, and Burundian, Rwandan, and Congolese people living in a Malawian refugee camp. It examines how artistic creativity for “refugees” in these contrasting circumstances can serve as magical forms of “connective practices of home-making.”

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines how artistic creativity for people living as “refugees” in contrasting circumstances in three different countries can serve as magical forms of “connective practices of home-making.” It draws from ethnographic research with Syrian migrants in Türkiye, Uyghur refugees in France, and Burundian, Rwandan, and Congolese people living in the Dzaleka refugee camp in Malawi. The larger project is centered on efforts by refugees who have landed temporarily or permanently to use arts to promote something positive within their own migrant communities or within the larger social context in which they find themselves. It offers counternarratives to the pervasive negative rhetoric about refugees by emphasizing strength, initiative, joy, and community, while bringing into relief the complex and very real challenges of forced migration. This presentation focuses on one example from each fieldwork site: 1) Syrian women living in Türkiye gather weekly to sing traditional songs, a means to connect them with their memories of home and one another. 2) Congolese youth living in a refugee camp in Malawi paint together in a shared gallery, giving youth something meaningful to do within a precarious existence. 3) A Uyghur poet living in exile in France teaches language through poetry to ensure that Uyghur children in the diaspora have a connection to a homeland they’ve never visited. In all three examples, artistic expressivity is the magic through which displaced people “unwrite” their narratives of displacement, grief, and fear to emphasize instead agency, connection, and joy.