Asylum Speakers

Title Page, Copyright Page

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Contents

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pp. v-

Acknowledgments

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pp. vii-ix

This project evolved from the ideas that I began exploring in my dissertation and I am thankful for the numerous people who have supported me as I shaped them into a book. My dissertation advisor Sangeeta Ray provided endless guidance...

Introduction: The Poetics of Hospitality: Refugee, Migrant, Testimony

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pp. 1-44

In her 2007 memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat recounts the events surrounding the death of her eighty-one-year-old uncle Joseph Dantica, who died while being detained by U.S. immigration...

1. Inter-dictions and Limbo Citizens: Haitian Boat Refugee Narratives

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pp. 45-87

As I have discussed, the politics of hospitality configures the asylum-seeking process as a site of struggle over refugees’ articulations. A poetics of hospitality foregrounds the place of language in deploying the state laws of hospitality...

2. False Witnessing: U.S. Coast Guard Photography of Haitian Boat Refugees

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pp. 88-130

In a speech given on June 1, 2007, in which he outlined his immigration reform proposal, President Bush described a moment from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy’s commencement ceremonies at which he gave the keynote...

3. Silent Subjectivities: Testimony and Haitian Labor Refugees

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pp. 131-176

In chapters 1 and 2, I analyzed the implications of witnessing the conditions of Haitian boat refugees on the open seas. As I discussed, the U.S. government has systematically cast Haitians as economic migrants, thereby disqualifying...

4. Corporate Containment: Refugee Seafarers on the Seas of Transnational Labor

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pp. 177-212

After spending months trapped aboard a nonfunctioning ship in Brooklyn Harbor, Esteban Gaitán, the protagonist of Francisco Goldman’s novel The Ordinary Seaman (1997), tells those he meets when he ventures into Brooklyn...

5. Crossing the Threshold of Asylum: Dominican and Cuban (Post)Refugee Narratives

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pp. 213-240

The majority of this book focuses on the instabilities of refugee subjectivities and the difficulties New World refugees confront in attempting to gain legitimacy in a host nation. As I have discussed, the modes of articulation that refugees are required to navigate...

Epilogue: Diverted Testimonies: New World Refugees in the Twenty-First Century

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pp. 241-249

It is difficult to imagine how to end a book about refugees, especially when so many of the refugees that I have discussed in Asylum Speakers have not arrived at a destination but remain in limbo. The conditions of New World refugees...

Notes

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pp. 251-285

Bibliography

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pp. 287-303

Index

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pp. 304-310