Waiting to Know What You Might Mean: Asylum, Literature and the Ethics of Listening
New Formations - ISSN 0950-2378
Volume 2024 Number 113
Waiting to Know What You Might Mean: Asylum, Literature and the Ethics of Listening
Rachael Gilmour pages 71‑88
DOI: 10.3898/NewF:113.04.2024
Abstract
This article approaches the UK asylum system as a system of linguistic bordering, in relation to literary and activist reimaginings of language exemplified by the Refugee Tales project.1 It examines Home Office practices of language and translation, and the weaponisation of English as a ‘detention language’, as elements of a border regime that reaches its apotheosis, as Refugee Tales makes clear, in indefinite immigration detention, in which people are removed from access to communication altogether. In response, I argue, this activist project seeks to reckon with the language practices of the state that are enacted in the name of British citizens, while looking for ways to re-establish ‘the possibility of trust / in language’.2 Refugee Tales seeks to remake English as a welcoming medium, imagining it in ways that are divested from borders and bordering. It does this partly in order to reclaim it as a tool of intervention in the institutional structures the project critiques. At the same time, as we see in the case of the recent Walking Inquiry into Immigration Detention,3 Refugee Tales also takes the imperatives, possibilities and contingencies of communication across linguistic difference as a model for a different kind of practice in policymaking.
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To cite this article
Rachael Gilmour (2024) Waiting to Know What You Might Mean: Asylum, Literature and the Ethics of Listening, New Formations, 2024(113), 71-88 . https://doi.org/10.3898/NewF:113.04.2024