Resisting Ireland’s Necropolitics of Asylum: Refugee Voices in Irish Literature and the Arts
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Aida Rosende-Pérez
Abstract
This article examines the representation of the Irish Asylum system – known as Direct Provision – by an artist and a writer who have experienced it first-hand. Vukašin Nedeljković’s art project Asylum Archive (2007 –) and Melatu Okorie’s short stories “Shackles” (2010) and “This Hostel Life” (2017) respectively engage in the visual and literary representation of unlivable life in this carceral system, both articulating a compelling critique of the necropolitical violence exerted in and through its operations. Their work foregrounds the spatial and time dimensions of detention, highlighting the vulnerability of international protection applicants whose lives are not only bounded by confinement but also deferred in indefinite waiting. Besides, this article contends that these works go far beyond critique, offering very powerful critical insights into the inmates’ affective responses to the injustices of the asylum regime, and how these can potentially open spaces of dissent and resistance.
Note
This publication is part of the research project “Communitas/Immunitas: Relational Ontologies in Atlantic Anglophone Cultures of the 21st Century”, grant PID2022-136904NB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033 and by “ERDF A way of making Europe”.
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- “Eene schoone engelsche troupe”: William Durham and His Company of Travelling Performers in Ghent (1713) and Germany (1724–1728)
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- Rebecca Brackmann. 2023. Old English Scholarship in the Seventeenth Century: Medievalism and National Crisis. Medievalism 23. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, xii + 235 pp., 14 illustr., £70.00 | $105.00 Hardcover, £29.95 | $24.99 Ebook.
- Carolin Harthan. 2022. Medially-Placed Linking Adverbials in Written Academic English: Usage Patterns and Functions. Munich Studies in English 49. Berlin: Lang, 340 pp., 41 figures, 51 tables, €83.20.
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