Anna Ball - Forced Migration in the Feminist Imagination

This book provides a much needed critical engagement with an entire field of multi-media work that has appeared in order to specifically document, represent and facilitate an understanding of the experiences of forced migration. Anna Balls intervention shows us how to construct creative and compassionate responses and as such it is a crucial book a necessary book.

Anastasia Valassopoulos, Senior Lecturer in World Literatures, University of Manchester, U.K.

This powerful book examines the forced migration of women as a gendered experience. Its original transcultural approach demonstrates the migration of women not as single transnational experiences, but as part of larger global trends about the perception of women that are influenced not only by the particular migratory path, but also by attitudes and knowledge towards other migratory places and experiences. Dr Ball compellingly weaves together the primary reading of text with larger theoretical questions about author intentionality, political currents, patterns of female engagement, the significance of maternity in establishing womens acceptability and need, and larger national and international questions about human rights crises, medical and political responsibility for refugees, and the politics of images in changing narratives about refugees from terrorists to victims. It is a must read for scholars of women and gender studies, and those interested in labor and forced migration.

Rachel Sylvia Harris, Associate Professor of Comparative and World Literature, University of Illinois, USA

This is a wonderful book! Deeply inspiring, essential reading and a major intervention in transcultural feminist approaches to forced migration. It will have resonance far beyond academia in reinvigorating feminist responses through the transcultural feminist imagination defined and practiced in the book.

Maggie ONeill, Professor in Sociology and Criminology, University College Cork, Ireland

Forced Migration in the Feminist Imagination explores how feminist acts of imaginative expression, community-building, scholarship, and activism create new possibilities for women experiencing forced migration in the twenty-first century.

Drawing on literature, film, and art from a range of transnational contexts including Europe, the Middle East, Central America, Australia, and the Caribbean, this volume reveals the hitherto unrecognised networks of feminist alliance being formulated across borders, while reflecting carefully on the complex politics of cross-cultural feminist solidarity. The book presents a variety of cultural case studies that each reveal a different context in which the transcultural feminist imagination can be seen to operate from the maternal feminism of literary journalism confronting the European refugee crisis to Irans female film directors building creative collaborations with displaced Afghan women; and from artists employing sonic creativities in order to listen to women in U.K. and Australian detention to LGBTQ+ poets and video artists articulating new forms of queer feminist community against the backdrop of the hostile environment.

This is an essential read for scholars in Womens and Gender Studies, Feminist and Postcolonial Literary and Cultural Studies, and Comparative Literary Studies, as well as for those operating in the fields of Gender and Development Studies and Forced Migration Studies.

Anna Ball is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Feminisms, Literatures, and Cultures at Nottingham Trent University, U.K. Working across literary, filmic, and artistic mediums, her research operates at the intersection of postcolonial feminist literary and cultural studies, and focusses primarily on the gendered politics of mobility, agency, and cultural expression at stake within sites of political instability in the Middle East and among its resulting global flows of forced migrants. She held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 20182019 in support of this work. Firmly committed to transcultural feminist community-building, she also engages in collaborative cultural work that enables those within forced migrant communities to explore their creative agency.

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Spatialities in Italian American Womens Literature

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Eva Pelayo Sanudo

Womens Suffrage in Word, Image, Music, Stage and Screen

The Making of a Movement

Edited by Christopher Wiley and Lucy Ella Rose

Intersectional Feminist Readings of Comics

Interpreting Gender in Graphic Narratives

Edited by Sandra Cox

Caffie Greene and Black Women Activists

Unsung Women of the Black Liberation Movement

Kofi Charu Nat Turner

Forced Migration in the Feminist Imagination

Transcultural Movements

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The Misogynistic Backlash to Women-Strong Films

Dana Schowalter, Shannon Stevens, and Daniel Horvath

Feminist Existentialism, Biopolitics, and Critical Phenomenology in a Time of Bad Health

Talia Welsh

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Interdisciplinary-Research-in-Gender/book-series/IRG

Anna Ball

First published 2022

by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2022 Anna Ball

The right of Anna Ball to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record has been requested for this book

ISBN: 978-0-367-34381-1 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-11096-7 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-32540-3 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9780429325403

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This book is a product of the immense hospitality, generosity, and care that has been extended to me by many individuals and organisations over the past six years. My thanks are due, first and foremost, to those who have welcomed me into their communities during this time, offering their insights, imaginations, and creative abilities as sources of inspiration. Notably, thank you to Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Refugee Forum, and, in particular, to all at the PAMOJA Women Together Group especially Veronica, Ola, Salani, Ghidey, Viola, and Jarrai (surnames omitted for privacy). Special thanks are due to Hannah Ziolek, Viviane Bizimana, and Lizzie Haines for their support during our collaborative projects. Thank you, too, to Survivor Alliance for the deeply moving collaborative opportunities we have shared and to those who work both regionally and nationally on Refugee Week, which has offered a platform for many of the debates and creative activities that have circulated around the writing of this book. A particular thank you to Natelle Morgan-Brown, April Chung, Kevin Price, Dave Hewitt, Margaret Levin, and Alexia Ball for their energy and solidarity over the years. I am also deeply grateful to Mirriam for the wisdom and creativity that she has shared with me and with the Refugee Week team. I wish to offer special thanks to Camilla Reeve, editor of Palewell Press, for her goodwill, integrity, and industrious labour during the creation of