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Writing in the wake of the political and social uprisings known as the "Arab Spring" and the restrictive European immigration policies that followed, Hakim Abderrezak contests the common notion that emigrants from former European colonies migrate predominantly to the land of the ex-colonizer. Focusing particularly on clandestine migration practices, he shows that despite a linguistic affinity, a tradition of labor, and additional historical ties with the colonizer, migrants from the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) are no longer trekking to France, but instead are drifting toward other destinations like Spain, Italy, Great Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and the Middle East. Abderrezak locates this migratory shift away from France in literary, cinematic, and musical representations of the emigrant's journey. Contrary to mass media coverage and mainstream political discourse, these cultural productions reveal new patterns of human movement and an alternative mapping of the Mediterranean

Charts new directions for interdisciplinary research on refugee writing and representationPlaces refugee imaginaries at the centre of interdisciplinary exchange, demonstrating the vital new perspectives on refugee experience available in humanities researchBrings together leading research in literary, performance, art and film studies, digital and new media, postcolonialism and critical race theory, transnational and comparative cultural studies, history, anthropology, philosophy, human geography and cultural politicsRead the IntroductionThe refugee has emerged as one of the key figures of the twenty-first-century. This book explores how refugees imagine the world and how the world imagines them. It demonstrates the ways in which refugees have been written into being by international law, governmental and non-governmental bodies and the media, and foregrounds the role of the arts and humanities in imagining, historicising and protesting the experiences of forced migration and statelessness.Including thirty-two newly written chapters on representations by and of refugees from leading researchers in the field, Refugee Imaginaries establishes the case for placing the study of the refugee at the centre of contemporary critical enquiry."