Afghan Refugees’ Iconic Stories

This article considers the stories Afghan refugees tell about their displacement from Afghanistan and emplacement in the United States. Drawing on scholarship about reportability, tellability, and storyability, this article argues that narrators foreground the noteworthiness of their experiences through specific sign relationships, foremost among them iconicity. Specifically, this article discusses two narrative strategies—parallelism and co-narration—Afghan refugee narrators use that heighten the evaluative functions of their most storyable personal narratives and create an iconic relationship between story and interview event

Afghan · Art · Displacement (psychology · Event (particle physics · Iconicity · Linguistics · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Parallelism (grammar · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Refugee · Scholarship · Sign (mathematics · Sociology · Syrian refugees · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Digital Storytelling and Education · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Rhetoric and Communication Studies