Narratives of Flight and Migration in Law and Literature

• Applicant: Dr. Katrin Althans
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 449673078

The present project, set in the field of law and literature, is concerned with the fictional representations of refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants found in six selected contemporary novels by British writers. I argue that the law exerts a narrative authority over the stories told in the asylum process in that it attaches a certain truth value to those stories which can be subsumed under the wording of the legal text: the legal definition of the refugee classifies only those narratives as authentic which correspond to the narrative already legitimized by the law itself. The main aim of this project is to analyse the ways in which fictional accounts of flight and migration use narrative strategies in order to reveal this narrative authority of the law, in particular of Art. 1(A)2 of the 1951 Refugee Convention.By self-consciously displaying their own literariness, deliberately fictional representations (as opposed to life writing with its very own claims to truth) allow for examining the imaginative status of the law, as they scrutinize the construction of refugees in law through their construction in literature. My analysis of the legal text through the lens of the literary text will then show the extent to which positive law, i.e., statutory regulations, is embedded in narratives and due to this exerts a narrative authority over the stories of refugees which is made invisible through the use of legalese. Revealing the narrative determination of refugees at the hands of legal regulations, literature thus serves as a valuable source of commentary on the law and emphasizes the narrativity of statutory regulations themselves.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants