A Poetics of Extraterritoriality in Edwidge Danticat’s Refugee Writing
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11638626 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alexandra Maria Lossada (0000-0002-7952-9921, Berry College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 54-74 |
| Publication date | 2025-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-755X • E-ISSN: 1946-3170 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/melus/mlaf006 |
| OpenAlex | W4408167268 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 11 |
Extraterritoriality is a juridical-spatial practice that legally excludes refugees by physically incarcerating them within a nation’s borders, thus introducing a paradox of being simultaneously inside and outside of a country. The American government has modernized and institutionalized forms of extraterritoriality in its responses to the multi-decade Haitian boat refugee crisis, which have been foundational for the exclusion of additional refugee groups. Edwidge Danticat captures the complexity of extraterritoriality in her refugee writing, primarily in the memoir Brother, I’m Dying (2007) and two short stories, “Children of the Sea” (1993) and “Without Inspection” (2019). When these texts are read together for the spaces through which refugees pass—namely, the ocean, immigration detention center, airport, and sky—we can witness how extraterritoriality binds locations and transit together in a network that prevents refugees from fully entering the United States and cuts narrators from their subjects. Yet extraterritoriality is not merely spatial in Danticat’s writing: in her capacity as an interpreter, that is, as someone operating both inside and outside of languages and silences, we can discern what we might call a poetics of extraterritoriality. This article proposes that Danticat is a practitioner of such a poetics, which is a set of interpretative strategies that transcends the narrative foreclosure attending extraterritorial spaces and policies and imagines otherwise impossible communions between lost refugee subjects and readers. In Danticat’s writing, extraterritoriality becomes both an ongoing geopolitical fact and a literary tactic that gives voice to refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented people
Archaeology · Art · Extraterritoriality · Linguistics · Literature · Poetics · Poetry · Political science · Refugee · Sociology · African history and culture studies · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · History · Law · Philosophy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |