Research in Drama Education

Vol. 13, No. 2, June 2008, 223
232

The journey is the film is the journey: Michael Winterbottoms In This

World
David Farrier*
English Department, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK
This essay examines Michael Winterbottoms 2002 film In This World, which
follows the journey of two Afghan migrants from Peshawar to London.
Winterbottoms preparation involved travelling from London to Peshawar and
then in reverse overland as far as Istanbul; he then returned to Peshawar and
filmed the same journey using two non-professional actors, one of whom
replicated the journey once filming was completed, to claim asylum in London.
I read the way in which the contexts of the films production repeat and reverse
the journey of its subject as a form of chiasmus, a rhetorical strategy identified by
Henry Louis Gates and others as a means of reclaiming a subject status from an
experience of displacement. In In This World, however, chiasmus signifies not the
potential for the displaced to redefine themselves but a condition of perpetual
displacement. I explore the way in which the filmmakers notion of a production
that continually crosses between genres has different implications for the film and
its subject, and how the depiction of space and movement is determined by very
different experiences of the exclusionary powers of Nation and State on the part
of filmmaker and migrant.
Keywords: In This World; refugee; performance; identity; chiasmus; journey

This essay examines the tensions between social and dramatic roles in the
performance of refugee identity. The focus is Michael Winterbottoms film In This
World (2002), but the argument engages with wider issues regarding the capacity of
the dramatic work to intervene in the reproduction of refugee identity, and to speak
on behalf of the refugee. I will employ a multi-disciplinary approach to a context in
which multiple disciplines (e.g. political theory, social anthropology, film theory) are
invested. My starting point is the rhetorical figure of the chiasmus. Henry Louis
Gates describes how, within the context of Afro-American narratives of displacement, a chiastic structure signals an intention to pursue transformation through
repetition and reversal (1988, 172). Referring to the famous chiastic statement in
the slave narrative of Frederick Douglass, You have seen how a man became a slave,
you will see how a slave became a man, Gates calls chiasmus, the central trope of
slave narration, in which the slave-object writes himself or herself into a humansubject through the act of writing (1988, 172).
Chiasmus has a particular application for African-American literary criticism,
with its emphasis on formal and informal wordplay and linguistic invention, but the
potential for chiasmus to express liberation in situations of displacement is not
limited to the context of writing. The Guyanese writer Wilson Harris invokes
*Email: df59@le.ac.uk
ISSN 1356-9783 print/ISSN 1470-112X online
# 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13569780802054927
http://www.informaworld.com

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repetition and reversal in his reflections on the limbo dance of West Indian Carnival,
which he traces to the slave ships of the Middle Passage, where there was so
little space that the slaves contorted themselves into human spiders. Limbo,
therefore, . . . is related to anancy or spider fables (1999, 157).1 Limbo is both a
memorialisation of the privations of the Middle Passage and an invocation of
cultural heritage that pays special attention to (imaginative) transformation through
performance rather than writing, as we see with Gates. Harris suggests that, within
the limbo dance, we see enacted the curious dislocation of a chain of miles; in the
limbo gateway between Africa and the Caribbean, the experience of displacement is
re-activated in the imagination (1999, 157). For Harris, this kind of transformation
of displacement through reversal has a chiastic shape: we arrive backwards even as
we voyage forwards (1999, 187). While not a chiasmus itself, this statement
accurately summarises the action and contours of reversal and renewal that occur
through an affinity with chiasmus.
Chaismus, then, operates in multiple contexts as a means of giving voice to and
also countering the effects of displacement. Harris indicates that it is with this habit
of reversal that we begin to put our finger on something which is close to the inner
universality of Caribbean man, which relates the displacement of the Middle
Passage to the refugee flying from Europe (1999, 157). I believe chiasmus is
significant in understanding In This World, which portrays the journey taken by two
Afghan migrants from Peshawar in Pakistan, to London. In preparation for making
the film, Winterbottom and the films writer Tony Grisoni travelled from London to
Peshawar and then made the journey in reverse overland as far as Istanbul, gathering
material to construct their narrative. Here they tried as far as possible to follow the
route taken by migrants, using the same means of transport. They then returned to
Peshawar and filmed the same journey using two non-professional actors, Pashtun
refugees Jamal Udin Torabi and Enyatullah Jumaudin.
This pattern of inversions continued in post-production; one of the actors, Jamal,
later replicated the journey again once filming was completed, travelling from
Peshawar to London to claim asylum. Winterbottom describes the experience of
editing the scene where Jamal leaves his family in the Shamshatoo camp:
Jamal was actually in the cutting room now watching it [having returned to the UK after
filming to apply for refugee status]. So by that point hed become the character in the
film and didnt know when hed ever see his brother again, didnt know when hed go
back there, and so it was one of the strangest things, to see the way in which the film that
was supposed to be a fiction based on reality had then become a reality itself. (In This
World)

The film and its para-contexts therefore assume a chiastic structure in which the
journey is the film, and the film is the journey. As such, it exhibits a series of constant
crossings between fiction and reality, and between the experience of the migrant and
the filmmaker. The film seems to use strategies of repetition not to illustrate
transformation but as the basis of a self-reflexive focus on the boundaries between
cinematic genres, and an exploration of the conditions that in fact foster an
experience of perpetual displacement. Yet, the films attempt to illustrate the realities
of the migrants journey by inserting itself into that journey creates a tension between
representation and effacement.

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Winterbottoms interest in making In This World was prompted by a fascination

with journeys; in fact, the entire film is organised around stages in the journey.
Teshome Gabriel, in a discussion of the nomad aesthetics of black cinema, invokes
chiasmus (albeit without direct reference) to describe the relationship between the
film and the journey: The journey is the link(age); without it, there is no film. There
is no film in and of itself. A film by itself is therefore meaningless
it conveys
nothing. Film exists so that the journey may exist, and vice versa (1990, 403).
Gabriels privileging of the journey in relation to the film, like Harriss meditations
on the limbo dance, can be read as indicative of the function of the chiasmus. His
assertion that film exists so that the journey may exist and vice versa in effect leads
us to a chiastic formation. In the manner in which it allows various journeys to
overlap and mirror each other, In This World employs an aesthetic that is dependent
on strategies of boundary-crossing, repetition and reversal, in which the crucial
distinction between fictional and actual crossings is blurred. In fact, Winterbottom
and Grisoni present the crossings of the film itself, and the journey of its production,
as their principle subject.
Although in many ways defying definition, In This World can reasonably be
compared to several existing or emerging genres. Referring to Hamid Naficys (2001)
definition of accented cinema, Rebecca Prime identifies the refugee film as an
emerging genre within which to categorise In This World:
The refugee film is an interstitial mode of production, marked by hybridity and fluidity
rather than allegiance to generic or institutional boundaries. As a form of transitional,
transnational cinema, the refugee film is preoccupied with space, integrating into its
structure the sense of displacement that is perhaps the fundamental experience of the
refugee and asylum seeker. (2006, 56)2

It should be acknowledged that the film is a powerful and provocative exploration of

the hardships and deprivations experienced by migrants who attempt to make a new
life in Europe. In many ways, it is extremely clear-eyed about its subject and
remarkably free of sensationalism. In Primes terms, its interstitial mode of
production is, equally, indicative of the filmmakers willingness to challenge
audiences and an apt method for conveying a sense of displacement. Yet it is also
precisely the use of such fluid strategies that leads the film to assume the central
position in a chiastic formation (the journey is the film is the journey) as the hinge on
which the various incarnations of the journey turn. Furthermore, Winterbottom
does not fit Naficys profile of the accented filmmaker as subject to a dual
postcolonial displacement and postmodern or late modern scattering (2001, 11). It
is worthwhile bearing in mind the homogenising impulse that can lie behind efforts
to group aesthetic forms under a single denominator; Alex Rotas warns that the
term refugee smoothes over difference within the group it designates at the same
time as reifying the notion that constitutes that boundary (2004, 52). The dangers
presented by the aestheticisation of refugees is one of the issues I will address here;
Winterbottom states that in casting the film he wanted two people who would be
examples of, stand in for, all the refugees in Peshawar (In This World). This essay
examines the extent to which the film dramatises a condition of displacement rather
than individual stories. Following Liisa Malkkis theorisation of the way refugees are
universalised through visual representation (1995a, 1995b, 1996), I will ask in what

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D. Farrier

ways does the journey of the film itself threaten to overshadow the film of the
journey?
I query Primes claim that because it contains no familiar faces and follows an
improvised structure, the film weaves the voice of the immigrant other into its very
structure allowing the voice of the invisible not only to be heard, but be seen (2006,
62). Multiple genres can be identified in In This World; at various stages it exhibits
the features of documentary, realism, the epic and the road movie. Grisoni highlights
this constant flux in genres as one of the films salient virtues: What is truth? I love
the fact that the film doesnt kow tow to notions of genre and separate boxes. The
most exciting thing is that it is always crossing (Australian Film Commission). The
films restlessness
crossing generic boundaries as it crosses between nations
is a
symptom of its interstitial mode of production in Primes terms, but this crossing
has significantly different implications for filmmaker and subject. This can be
observed in two of the genres referenced by the film: the road movie and the
documentary.
In examining the visual representation of refugees, Terence Wright identifies the
features of the road movie as demonstrating similarities with films of migration:
At the beginning of this genre of film we usually witness a dispensing of objects that
symbolise the life to be left behind . . . Usually two characters set out on an adventure;
they meet various good, bad and ugly characters en route; a major set-back is resolved
and, although their final goal (end of the journey) is reached (or may be in sight), it is
likely to end in disaster . . . The film structure is that of an episodic journey through
which characters can be involved in the process of self-discovery or learning about each
other along the way; this can be in the form of a life-changing experience. As the Road
Movie has its own rules, iconography and conventions, this means that the movie
migrant is set on a predestined course from point A to point B. The implications for the
narrative are that the end of the journey is finite (and often stated in the early stages of
the film) and the drama is acted out sequentially in chronological time. (2000, 16
7)

In This World exhibits most of the features identified here. Jamal and Enyatullahs
journey is blessed by the slaughter of a cow, symbolising departure and the culture
they are to leave behind; the narrative of their journey is episodic, constructed from a
series of encounters with characters who either assist them (Kurdish villagers who
give them shelter), hinder them (an Iranian border official who sends them back to
Pakistan), or whose motives for helping them are selfish (the fixers whom they pay to
move them from point to point); and they encounter a number of setbacks, most
especially the disaster of Enyatullahs death in a container on the way to Trieste. The
film culminates with Jamals arrival in London, the stated endpoint of the journey.
Yet the film also departs from this generic conformity in significant ways. Jamal
and Enyatullah give little indication that they are on a journey of self-discovery;
rather, each stage is dominated by their need to progress to the next phase. In
addition, Winterbottom suggests that, contrary to Wrights formula, the journey is
not finite. Referring to Jamals arrival in London, Winterbottom remarks that the
experience is not necessarily much different to what it would have been like if theyd
stopped in Istanbul, Tehran or wherever (McNab 2003). London acts as an
endpoint to the journey only in narrative terms; in other terms, the essentially
arbitrary nature of Jamals location has little bearing on his condition of
displacement. Just as the film itself is always crossing between genres, Winterbottom

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does not depict displacement as limited to a single movement from one point to
another.
In This World also departs from Wrights description of the road movie by
playing with the boundary between fiction and reality. In the Behind the Scenes
documentary that accompanies the DVD version, both writer and director take
pains to stress how the film refused to settle as either fiction or documentary. This is
made especially evident in the casting, as Winterbottom explains:
The first person we met was Imran, who was a travel agent in Peshawar and he became
our fixer for our research trip, and then again fixer while we were filming, and he also
acted [the part of] the fixer in the film. I guess thats the relationship between fiction and
reality that we tried to follow, in that its not a documentary, people are acting, but
generally we found people who would play themselves in the film, or do things they did
in normal life. (In This World)

In Imrans case, his multiple roles as fixer set up a series of reversals and repetitions;
while moving back and forth between facilitating actual and fictional journeys,
providing documents to allow Jamal and Enyatullah to travel with the crew and then
repeating this in scenes for the film, Imran enacts the chiasmus which states that the
journey is the film is the journey.
Despite his assertion that the film is not a documentary, Winterbottom does
acknowledge a cross-over with that genre; the film is in a sense a document of the
journey we organised for Jamal and Enyatullah. It was scripted only to the extent of
dictating a series of scenarios within which the actors were asked to do what they
want[ed] to do (In This World). Yet, despite the filmmakers strident efforts to allow
the subject to speak for itself, the journey made by the film itself effectively jostles for
space with the journey played out on screen. The use of documentary techniques
explicitly refers to the presence of the filmmaker, creating a tension between (self)
representation and (self) effacement; Winterbottom asserts that in editing the film,
we werent pretending we werent there (In This World). The most notable elements
of documentary style are the use of animated maps to indicate the progress of the
journey and a voiceover to accompany the opening sequence at the Shamshatoo
camp, in which the resident children look directly into the camera. The filmmakers
openness about the constructedness of the film does allow us to see beyond its
fictional frame and thus undercuts its subordination to the demands of a particular
fictional genre. Yet the film is also a document of many journeys, or the point of
intersection of a network of journeys within which the presence of the filmmaker
asserts itself, if not through conventional means such as scripted dialogue then in a
more self-reflexive fashion, using documentary techniques. The foregrounding of the
filmmaker in such a self-consciously constructed artefact establishes a tension
between the mediated and unmediated subject and risks at least partially obscuring
the subject to whom it tries so concertedly to give voice.
Awareness of an organising presence behind the film is also maintained by an at
times extremely fast-paced style of editing. Prime argues that this editing fractures
and ruptures the space of the journey as a means of mimicking the confusion and
dislocation experienced by the refugee (2006, 60
1). In her view, this formal
technique stresses that Jamal and Enyatullah must constantly negotiate the rift
between smooth space and striated space as described by Deleuze and Guattari
(2006, 62). Striated space is associated with the compulsion of State power to impose

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divisions, and is thus realised most comprehensively at borders. In its representation

of multiple border crossings, In This World may be read as an extended engagement
with striated space, a factor that has direct relevance to the films representation of
refugees.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, striated space has both a limiting and
limited function:
It is limited in its parts, which are assigned constant directions, are oriented in relation
to one another, divisible by boundaries, and can interlink; what is limiting . . . is this
aggregate in relation to the smooth spaces it contains, whose growth it slows or
prevents, and which it restricts or places outside. (1988, 382)

It is the function of the border, constituted by a network of points of potential access,

to impose a limit both on itself and on those who seek to pass through it without the
required documentation. Enrica Rigo maintains that borders not only demarcate the
limits of national space, they also impose a limit function on people who approach
the border from the other side: its function is less concerned with separation than
with differentiation (2005, 4). In this context the refugee plays a special role as a
limit-function within the nation; as Giorgio Agamben argues, the refugee threatens
to introduce crisis into the nation by break[ing] the continuity between man and
citizen, nativity and nationality (1998, 131). The refugee represents a body not
invested with any rights to belong, but whose presence illuminates the artificiality of
the link between nativity and nationality that is the foundation of the nation. Their
experiences at various borders clearly indicate Jamal and Enyatullah are made to
occupy or constitute a limit; they are either turned away, as at the Pakistani
Iranian
border, or accommodated in another refugee camp, as Jamal is in Sangatte. Neither
is it insignificant that the two are forced to adopt increasingly liminal forms of
transport, especially as they approach Europe: Enyatullah dies in the container to
Trieste and Jamal crosses the Channel under a lorry. If, as Naficy has stated, vehicles
provide . . . metaphorical reworkings of notions of travelling, homing and identity in
migrant films (2001, 257), then the irregular channels through which Jamal and
Enyatullah travel articulate the troubling nature of their function as a limit to
belonging.
The border function dramatised in the film parallels trends identified by Malkki,
who observes that refugees represent a challenge to the social life of the nation as a
powerful regime of classification in which they are produced and made meaningful
by the categorical order itself, even as they are excluded from it (1995a, 6). In effect,
the universalised refugee is absorbed by the nation as a limit category, made an
object of specialization (1996, 9) and an entity of quantifiable knowledge. This
introduces a standardised way of speaking about the refugee that Malkki calls the
discursive externalization of the refugee from the national . . . order of things (1996,
9), a process that ultimately fixes the refugee at a point of externality. Malkki argues
that this universalisation, most commonly observed in visual media, also produces
the discursive constitution of the refugee as bare humanity (1996, 110). The
refugee as a type is stripped of the specificity of culture, place, and history and comes
therefore to stand for all of us at our most naked and basic level (Hannah Arendt
quoted in Malkki 1995a, 12). The representation of the refugee as bare humanity
runs close to Winterbottoms admission that he was attempting to dramatise a

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condition of displacement rather than individual stories. If this aligns his approach
with Malkkis comment on the tendency to universalize the refugee as a special
kind of person (1995a, 9), it is also suggestive of her observation that the
refugee is commonly constituted as a figure who is thought to speak to us in a
particular way: wordlessly (1996, 390). It is plausible therefore to associate the
contemporary refugee with Gayatri Spivaks colonial subaltern, who is both
irretrievably heterogeneous and has its identity in its difference (1988, 284
5).
While In This World strives for (and achieves) a high degree of material authenticity
in the depiction of the journey, its tendency to homogenise the story of the journey
leaves it open to accusations of dehistoricisation. Jamal and Enyatullahs reasons for
migrating are left unstated, although they are most likely economic, allowing the
viewer to invest in them a universalised condition of displacement.
Consequently, despite its explicit concern to give voice to the invisible refugee, In
This World only implicitly criticises the biopolitical forces that affect refugees. The
film is in effect bookended by scenes of the camp
by footage of Shamshatoo, and of
Jamals experience in Sangatte
which calls to mind Agambens declaration of the
camp as the pure, absolute and impassable biopolitical space (1998, 123). If the
refugee is made to represent a limit-concept, the camp is its geographical and
conceptual materialisation, a limit zone between . . . inside and outside, in which
[those detained] were no longer anything but bare life (1998, 159). Although
Agamben refers to the carceral camp, as distinct from the settlements at Shamshatoo
and Sangatte, the dehistoricising influence of the camp is equally applicable.
Malkki calls the camp a vital device of power that produces the refugee as a
knowable, nameable figure (1995b, 498). Aligned with Winterbottoms comments
on the homogeneity of each stage of the journey, the fact that the narrative ends as it
begins with images of Shamshatoo gives credence to a reading of the films portrayal
of chiasmus as a form of perpetual displacement.
In aesthetic and structural terms, the film also shows signs of complicity in the
operations of striated space. As Deleuze and Guattari state, one of the fundamental
tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, . . . not only to vanquish
nomadism but to control migration (1988, 385). Here, a crucial space opens up
between Deleuze and Guattaris definition of nomad, and its application in In This
World. They align the migrants experience with the definition of striated space: the
migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the second point is
uncertain; striated space is a question of going from one point to another (1988,
380, 353). By contrast, both the nomad and smooth space are defined by a more
diffuse movement; in smooth space, the movement is not from one point to another,
but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival;
the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual
necessity; in principle, points for him are relays along a trajectory (1988, 380, 353).
Jamal and Enyatullahs journey, ostensibly between two points, is also structured by
a series of relays in a trajectory. Their progress towards a fixed point is an absolute,
yet the experience of that journey resembles the perpetual displacement that is a
feature of smooth space.
In addition, the depiction of striated space in In This World is frequently
associated with the presence of the filmmaker. The intensity and stress of illegally
crossing borders is indicated by a range of overt technical strategies; music
a series
of rapid pulses on the trumpet
is used to create a sense of muted tension at

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significant moments, most notably when Jamal travels to Britain clinging to the
underside of a heavy goods vehicle. The films music sets up a contrast with the
realism suggested by the use of handheld cameras; at another point, when Jamal and
Enyatullah cross at night from Iran into Turkey, the grainy, degraded black and
white film stock replicates the sense of confusion felt by the migrants. It is not
insignificant that Winterbottom draws attention to the constructedness of the film at
moments when Jamal and Enyatullah encounter striated space. Titles superimposed
on the screen and animated maps are often used to convey that the characters have
crossed to a different country. Within the films aesthetic striated space, that which is
limited and limiting acts as a mark of the directors presence in the film.
I have attempted to draw out some of the tensions between the film and its
subject in In This World. It could be argued that by playing on the parallels between
the journey of the film and the film of the journey, Winterbottom attempts to travel
in sympathy with his subject in a similar fashion to Sorious Samuras film Living
With Illegals (2006), in which Samura makes the journey from Ceuta to London in
the company of West African migrants. Yet while both play with the boundaries and
limits of affinity
Samura is open about how his crew bought train tickets for him
once he had been discovered attempting to travel without them, for example
In This
World introduces a level of ambiguity that is not wholly resolved by the ingenuity
with which it finds ways to allow refugees to be seen and heard. If the film does
present the voice and image of a genuine refugee who has made the journey to the
UK, it only does so anachronously, as Winterbottom himself admits when he
described the strange experience of editing the footage in the presence of Jamal, once
he had applied for asylum. The chiastic context of its production confers a kind of
authenticity on the film, but nonetheless the film itself, as a fiction whose production
was the original journey, is fixed as the privileged subject.
The experience of movement is central to the films ambivalence. Winterbottom
has described how the film came to resemble a kind of illegitimate migrant; because
some regional authorities were uncomfortable with the filmmakers activities, often
the producers would have to carry the previous days rushes clandestinely across a
border in advance of the crew to avoid confiscation. Zygmunt Bauman identifies
differences in the experience of movement as a crucial feature of identification within
the globalised world. His definition of the tourist and the vagabond seem to be useful
here in distinguishing between the film(maker) and subject:
The tourists stay or move at their hearts desire . . . The vagabonds know that they wont
stay in a place for long, however strongly they wish to, since nowhere they stop are they
likely to be welcome. The tourists move because they find the world within their (global)
reach irresistibly attractive
the vagabonds move because they find the world within
their (local) reach unbearably inhospitable. The tourists travel because they want to; the
vagabonds because they have no other bearable choice. (1998, 92
3)

While it would be speculative to say that Winterbottom and his crew travelled to
Peshawar because they found it attractive, the emphasis on volition of movement is
relevant. In Eastern Turkey the crew had to pretend to be tourists (this was possible
with the unusually small size of the production) because of official sensitivities to
filming. Such an ability to transform is a key attribute of the tourist; in contrast, the
vagabond is denied this capacity: vagabonds are travellers refused the right to turn
into tourists. They are allowed neither to stay put (there is no site guaranteeing

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permanence, the end to undesirable mobility) nor search for a better place to be
(Bauman 1998, 93). This is illustrated by Jamal who, we are told at the end of the
film, has been given ELR (exceptional leave to remain) status in the UK that will
expire the day before his 18th birthday. Although it assumes a chiastic structure,
then, In This World does not engage with the transformative potential chiasmus is
taken to signify in other contexts of displacement. Rather, the chiastic reversals and
repetitions are representative of the perpetual displacement that is the condition of
refugees.
As In This World powerfully exposes the way vast numbers of people are forced
to move in search of better prospects, it has great potential to shock. Yet, in the play
between foregrounding and effacing the voice of its subject, the film stands not only
in the place of its subject, but also in the place of those forces that efface, silence or
dehistoricise individual refugee voices. The association of marks of the filmmakers
presence with striated space suggests that, in spite of Winterbottom and Grisonis
claims to a reciprocal understanding with their cast, in a fundamental way the voice
of the displaced remains beyond the films capacity to articulate and must therefore
be appropriated. The waiter who helps Jamal travel from Sangatte to London, and
who dreams of returning to the restaurant in which he worked during a previous stay,
represents another kind of perpetual crossing to which the filmmakers by necessity
had limited access. Because it insists on not avoiding the fact that the subject is
mediated, In This World has a very ambiguous relationship with its subject; yet the
complexity of repetitions and reversals between film and subject also dramatises
some of the forces that affect the representation of refugees, at least partially
allowing their voices to be heard, and seen.

Notes
1. Harris refers to the West African fables of the trickster, who often took the form of a spider,
which were carried to the Caribbean with the slaves.
2. Prime also identifies Stephen Frearss Dirty Pretty Things (2002) as an example of the
refugee film. Other examples might include the Dardenne Brotherss La Promesse (1995),
Michael Hanekes Code Unknown (2000), Pawel Pawlokowskis Last Resort (2000), and
Nick Broomfields Ghosts (2007).

Notes on contributor
David Farrier is lecturer in post-colonial literature at the University of Leicester. He is the
author of Unsettled Narratives: The Pacific Writings of Stevenson, Ellis, Melville and London,
and articles on Derek Walcott, Michael Ondaatje and Robert Louis Stevenson. He is currently
writing a book on the convergence of post-colonial and refugee studies.

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