当前位置: X-MOL 学术Radical Teacher › 论文详情
Our official English website, www.x-mol.net, welcomes your feedback! (Note: you will need to create a separate account there.)
Changing the Narrative of Displacement in Africa: Counter-Narratives, Agency, and Dignity
Radical Teacher Pub Date : 2021-08-18 , DOI: 10.5195/rt.2021.890
Husseina Dinani

This essay draws on the author’s experiences of teaching Binyavanga Wainaina’s “How to Write about Africa” and select chapters from Ben Rawlence’s City of Thorns: Nine Lives in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp in various undergraduate courses at University of Toronto Scarborough, Ontario, Canada. It makes the case for how these works enable instructors to disrupt the normative narrative of displacement based on the victim-perpetrator binary in mainstream media and humanitarian discourses and center the multidimensionality of displaced peoples across different eras and geographical locations. The essay discusses how each work offers students with strong counter-narratives to the dominant depoliticized and depersonalized accounts of dislocation in Africa by considering historical and contemporary context and foregrounding (displaced) Africans as humans that have agency and dignity. Additionally, the essay demonstrates how each work galvanizes students to identify and deconstruct their implicit biases, particularly when it comes to how they may have (unknowingly) contributed to the continuing portrayal of displaced Africans in victimizing ways. Through student discussion and coursework, the essay demonstrates how each work can empower students, who have themselves or have family members who previously experienced dislocation, to share their experiences and use them to build their own counter-narratives, in the process constructing an enriched archive of displacement that goes beyond the frameworks offered in course materials and that can be used to understand processes of displacement beyond the particular contexts discussed in the classroom. Keywords: African experiences, Agency, Displacement, Refugees, Dadaab,

中文翻译:

改变非洲流离失所的叙述:反叙述、代理和尊严

本文借鉴作者在加拿大安大略省多伦多大学士嘉堡分校的各种本科课程中教授 Binyavanga Wainaina 的“如何写非洲”的经验,并从 Ben Rawlence 的荆棘之城:世界上最大的难民营中的九个人中选择章节。它说明了这些作品如何使教师能够打破基于主流媒体和人道主义话语中受害者-施暴者二元论的流离失所的规范叙述,并以不同时代和地理位置的流离失所者的多维性为中心。这篇文章讨论了每部作品如何通过考虑历史和当代背景以及将(流离失所的)非洲人作为具有代理和尊严的人类来为学生提供强有力的反叙事,以对抗非洲主要的非政治化和非人格化的错位叙述。此外,这篇文章还展示了每件作品如何激发学生识别和解构他们的隐性偏见,特别是当他们可能(在不知不觉中)以受害方式继续描绘流离失所的非洲人时。通过学生讨论和课程作业,这篇文章展示了每件作品如何让拥有自己或家庭成员曾经经历过错位的学生能够分享他们的经历并利用他们建立自己的反叙事,在此过程中,我们构建了一个丰富的流离失所档案,该档案超出了课程材料中提供的框架,可用于理解课堂讨论的特定背景之外的流离失所过程。关键词:非洲经验、机构、流离失所、难民、达达布、
更新日期:2021-08-18
down
wechat
bug