Roger Bromley | University of Nottingham (original) (raw)
Papers by Roger Bromley
The Handbook of Global Interventions in Communication Theory, 2022
Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies, 2019
Arguably, the most urgent narratives in the contemporary world are political in the widest sense ... more Arguably, the most urgent narratives in the contemporary world are political in the widest sense of the term. It seems to me, certainly from a European perspective that there are two major, conflicting political narratives at the moment: a European one from a White Nationalist, Identitarian perspective, seeing itself in danger of being displaced by migrants, challenged by a narrative from the Global South, itself constructed by those in flight from war, poverty, and exploitation. Both, in a profound sense, are linked by displacement, one metaphorical/symbolic, and the other emergent and actual. In this paper, I want to concentrate upon this particular European (or, more precisely perhaps, Euro-American) far Right narrative which, if not exactly dominant, is
Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture, 2021
This chapter briefly touches upon the debate about whether the conditions of the 1951 Geneva Conv... more This chapter briefly touches upon the debate about whether the conditions of the 1951 Geneva Convention are too restrictive in so far as they limit the definition of the refugee to a specific fear of persecution. It asks questions about whether those fleeing from poverty, material and environmental degradation, and profound social disadvantage should also be considered alongside those with a claim to political refugee status. Richmond's typology of "reactive migration" (Richmond 1993) demonstrated the inadequacy of existing criteria which surround the refugee situation and, with this in mind, the chapter examines four different cultural textsthree graphic narratives 1 with very different styles, and a documentary film-all of which feature migrants with varying statuses, including an 'economic' migrant, an asylum seeker who fled from 'a genuine fear of persecution' and was permitted to make an application, and two 'illegal' migrants living in camps, hoping to seek asylum. Although the protagonists in each text face quite different challenges, they all suffer from a profound ontological insecurity. As Europe four years ago was, apparently in the midst of a humanitarian crisis, with thirty times more refugees entering the continent in January and February of that year (2016) than in the same two months in the previous year, it is timely to ask what kind of lives these people have
The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing, 2020
Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture, 2021
Displacement and borders have featured in the book so far, and in this chapter the border is enco... more Displacement and borders have featured in the book so far, and in this chapter the border is encountered in the form of physical barriers such as security fences, heavily policed coastal waters and the boundaries of the nation-state in Europe with its powerful legacy of coloniality pushing borders further and further into Africa. Although the majority of those migrating in Africa move within the continent, sufficient numbers have attempted to enter Europe and the US to the extent that this movement of people, together with those from the Middle East, has produced a far-right populist backlash constructed around the ‘immigrant’ who is seen as part of a calculated replacement of ‘ethnic’ (white) Europeans or, in the US, as an agent of ‘white genocide’. A brief exploration of this phase of populism will constitute the opening sections of the chapter, followed by an analysis of Those Who Jump (2016) and The Gurugu Pledge (2017), a film and a novel set on the African/EU border in Morocco. The final section will examine African Titanics (2014 [2008]), a novel which reflects on the ‘seduction’ of the African migrant by Europe, the travails of the desert journey and the dereliction of care at sea.
Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture, 2021
The final chapter deals with possibly the most protracted displacements of our time, both histori... more The final chapter deals with possibly the most protracted displacements of our time, both historic and continuing in the form of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Apart from the millions of refugees outside of Palestine, people within these territories face displacement and what are, effectively, borders on a daily basis in the form of checkpoints, roadblocks, body searches, curfews and the need for permits, all of which cause dislocation and, in the period since the construction of the security wall, have also separated people from their land, their work and their schools. No attempt will be made to add to the extensive literature on the politics of the Occupation but simply to examine its impact in terms of literary and cultural representation—the human factor. Together with two memoirs by Mourid Barghouti, three texts will be analysed as part of this examination: a short story by Liana Badr, “Other Cities” (2006) a novella, Minor Detail (2020 [2017]) by Adania Shibli, a...
This series represents an exciting new publishing opportunity for scholars working at the interse... more This series represents an exciting new publishing opportunity for scholars working at the intersection of literary, cultural, and mobilities research. The editors welcome proposals that engage with movement of all kinds-ranging from the global and transnational to the local and the everyday. The series is particularly concerned with examining the material means and structures of movement, as well as the infrastructures that surround such movement, with a focus on transport, travel, postcolonialism, and/or embodiment. While we expect many titles from literary scholars who draw upon research originating in cultural geography and/or sociology in order to gain valuable new insights into literary and cultural texts, proposals are equally welcome from scholars working in the social sciences who make use of literary and cultural texts in their theorizing. The series invites monographs that engage with textual materials of all kinds-i.e., film, photography, digital media, and the visual arts, as well as fiction, poetry, and other literary forms-and projects engaging with non-western literatures and cultures are especially welcome.
Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture, 2021
Displacement and borders have featured in the book so far, and in this chapter the border is enco... more Displacement and borders have featured in the book so far, and in this chapter the border is encountered in the form of physical barriers such as security fences, heavily policed coastal waters and the boundaries of the nation-state in Europe with its powerful legacy of coloniality pushing borders further and further into Africa. Although the majority of those migrating in Africa move within the continent, sufficient numbers have attempted to enter Europe and the US to the extent that this movement of people, together with those from the Middle East, has produced a far-right populist backlash constructed around the ‘immigrant’ who is seen as part of a calculated replacement of ‘ethnic’ (white) Europeans or, in the US, as an agent of ‘white genocide’. A brief exploration of this phase of populism will constitute the opening sections of the chapter, followed by an analysis of Those Who Jump (2016) and The Gurugu Pledge (2017), a film and a novel set on the African/EU border in Morocco...
Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture, 2021
Waiting and immobility, together with detainment, form the most common experience for most refuge... more Waiting and immobility, together with detainment, form the most common experience for most refugees when, or if, they manage to reach a place where they can be considered for asylum. This chapter focuses, initially, on two films—one a feature (Escape to Paradise, 2001), the other a documentary (La Forteresse, 2008)—both set in Switzerland in the first part of this century. Delay, obstruction and a culture of disbelief characterise their experience of seeking asylum in a convoluted and hostile system. The second half of the chapter concentrates upon an even greater culture of endless waiting, disbelief and hostility, this time in the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre, Papua New Guinea, which is, effectively, an Australian offshore prison for the warehousing of refugees. This experience is recorded in the remarkable ‘auto-ethnography’ of Behrouz Boochani: No Friend but the Mountains (2019).
Creating Destruction, 2011
Beast, Vermin, Insect-Hate Media and the Construction of the Enemy: The Case of Rwanda, 1990-1994... more Beast, Vermin, Insect-Hate Media and the Construction of the Enemy: The Case of Rwanda, 1990-1994 Roger Bromley For Emma and Jonah, children of hope Abstract This chapter was prompted by a poem by Sam Keen,'To Create an Enemy', in which the 'other'is ...
Cover Stories Narrative and ideology in the British spy thriller by Michael Denning Combining cul... more Cover Stories Narrative and ideology in the British spy thriller by Michael Denning Combining cultural history with narrative analysis, Michael Denning tracks the spy thriller from John Buchan to Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming and John Le Carré, and shows how these tales tell a history of our times, and attempt to resolve crises and contradictions in ideologies of nation and empire, of class Series editors' preface There are many good reasons for studying popular fiction. The best, though, is that it matters. In the many and varied forms in which they are produced and circulated-by the cinema, broadcasting institutions and the publishing industry-popular fictions saturate the rhythms of everyday life. In doing so, they help to define our sense of our selves, shaping our desires, fantasies, imagined pasts and projected futures. An understanding of such fictions-of how they are produced and circulated, organized and received-is thus central to an understanding of our selves; of how these selves have been shaped and of how they might be changed. This series is intended to contribute to such an understanding by providing a context in which different traditions and directions in the study of popular fiction might be brought into contact so as to interanimate one another. It will thus range across the institutions of cinema, broadcasting and publishing, seeking to illuminate both their respective specificities as well as the relations between them with a view to identifying the ways in which popular film, television and writing interact as parts of developed cultural technologies for the formation of subjectivities. Consideration of the generic properties of popular fiction will thus be situated within an analysis of viii Series editors' preface their historical and institutional conditions of production and reception. Similarly, the series will represent, and coordinate a debate between, the diverse political perspectives through which the study of popular fiction has been shaped and defined in recent years. Feminist studies of the part popular fictions play in the production of gendered subjectivities and relations; Marxist perspectives on the relations between popular fictions and class formations; popular fiction as a site for the reproduction and contestation of subordinate racial and national identities: in encompassing contributions from these often sharply contrasting traditions of thought the series will explore the complex and intertwining web of political relations in which the production and reception of popular fictions are involved. It should be clear, though, that in all this our aim is not to transform popular fiction into something else-into literature, say, or art cinema. If the study of popular fiction matters it is because what is ultimately at stake in such analysis is the production of a better popular fiction as well as of better, politically more productive ways of reading it.
Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2017
How, and at what point, does a person, or a group of people, described as migrant or of migrant o... more How, and at what point, does a person, or a group of people, described as migrant or of migrant origin, cease to be thought of as migrants or exclusively in terms of their ethnicity? This article responds to this question by exploring a range of theoretical arguments in relation to what has come to be called postmigration. The emphasis is on second and third generation "migrants", born in their country of residence, and on the ways in which through developing new cultural and representational practices they seek to go beyond confining and essentialising definitions which have an "othering" effect. At the same time, it is acknowledged that those of the first generation may also be engaged in a similar struggle to find agency in forms of the future. In speculating on possible meanings of postmigration, two texts will be examined, one a work of fiction, the other a social and cultural survey, which implicitly or explicitly address ways of transcending the limits of minority ascription in the context of racism, xenophobia, traditionalism, and Islamophobia.
Altre Modernità, Nov 23, 2014
Journal for Cultural Research, 2015
The aim of this article is to draw a few theoretical links between writing and revolution, whilst... more The aim of this article is to draw a few theoretical links between writing and revolution, whilst exploring how the acts of writing/witnessing/remembering can metaphorically ‘give memory a future’ in Paul Ricoeur’s words. The article situates the two memoirs of Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif Cairo: My City, Our Revolution and Syrian novelist Samar Yazbek A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution and their first-hand experience of the uprisings in Egypt and Syria within the genre of writing and memory. I argue that these writers combine reflexive observation with eyewitness testimony and in each there is a staging, a performative act of memory-making, in the sense that they are constructing a present for remembering, with the writer as witness within a ‘we-memory’ community. The writers are conscious of the historicity of the moment and are endeavouring to produce what might be called legacy writing.
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 02690058508574080, Jul 18, 2008
The Handbook of Global Interventions in Communication Theory, 2022
Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies, 2019
Arguably, the most urgent narratives in the contemporary world are political in the widest sense ... more Arguably, the most urgent narratives in the contemporary world are political in the widest sense of the term. It seems to me, certainly from a European perspective that there are two major, conflicting political narratives at the moment: a European one from a White Nationalist, Identitarian perspective, seeing itself in danger of being displaced by migrants, challenged by a narrative from the Global South, itself constructed by those in flight from war, poverty, and exploitation. Both, in a profound sense, are linked by displacement, one metaphorical/symbolic, and the other emergent and actual. In this paper, I want to concentrate upon this particular European (or, more precisely perhaps, Euro-American) far Right narrative which, if not exactly dominant, is
Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture, 2021
This chapter briefly touches upon the debate about whether the conditions of the 1951 Geneva Conv... more This chapter briefly touches upon the debate about whether the conditions of the 1951 Geneva Convention are too restrictive in so far as they limit the definition of the refugee to a specific fear of persecution. It asks questions about whether those fleeing from poverty, material and environmental degradation, and profound social disadvantage should also be considered alongside those with a claim to political refugee status. Richmond's typology of "reactive migration" (Richmond 1993) demonstrated the inadequacy of existing criteria which surround the refugee situation and, with this in mind, the chapter examines four different cultural textsthree graphic narratives 1 with very different styles, and a documentary film-all of which feature migrants with varying statuses, including an 'economic' migrant, an asylum seeker who fled from 'a genuine fear of persecution' and was permitted to make an application, and two 'illegal' migrants living in camps, hoping to seek asylum. Although the protagonists in each text face quite different challenges, they all suffer from a profound ontological insecurity. As Europe four years ago was, apparently in the midst of a humanitarian crisis, with thirty times more refugees entering the continent in January and February of that year (2016) than in the same two months in the previous year, it is timely to ask what kind of lives these people have
The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing, 2020
Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture, 2021
Displacement and borders have featured in the book so far, and in this chapter the border is enco... more Displacement and borders have featured in the book so far, and in this chapter the border is encountered in the form of physical barriers such as security fences, heavily policed coastal waters and the boundaries of the nation-state in Europe with its powerful legacy of coloniality pushing borders further and further into Africa. Although the majority of those migrating in Africa move within the continent, sufficient numbers have attempted to enter Europe and the US to the extent that this movement of people, together with those from the Middle East, has produced a far-right populist backlash constructed around the ‘immigrant’ who is seen as part of a calculated replacement of ‘ethnic’ (white) Europeans or, in the US, as an agent of ‘white genocide’. A brief exploration of this phase of populism will constitute the opening sections of the chapter, followed by an analysis of Those Who Jump (2016) and The Gurugu Pledge (2017), a film and a novel set on the African/EU border in Morocco. The final section will examine African Titanics (2014 [2008]), a novel which reflects on the ‘seduction’ of the African migrant by Europe, the travails of the desert journey and the dereliction of care at sea.
Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture, 2021
The final chapter deals with possibly the most protracted displacements of our time, both histori... more The final chapter deals with possibly the most protracted displacements of our time, both historic and continuing in the form of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). Apart from the millions of refugees outside of Palestine, people within these territories face displacement and what are, effectively, borders on a daily basis in the form of checkpoints, roadblocks, body searches, curfews and the need for permits, all of which cause dislocation and, in the period since the construction of the security wall, have also separated people from their land, their work and their schools. No attempt will be made to add to the extensive literature on the politics of the Occupation but simply to examine its impact in terms of literary and cultural representation—the human factor. Together with two memoirs by Mourid Barghouti, three texts will be analysed as part of this examination: a short story by Liana Badr, “Other Cities” (2006) a novella, Minor Detail (2020 [2017]) by Adania Shibli, a...
This series represents an exciting new publishing opportunity for scholars working at the interse... more This series represents an exciting new publishing opportunity for scholars working at the intersection of literary, cultural, and mobilities research. The editors welcome proposals that engage with movement of all kinds-ranging from the global and transnational to the local and the everyday. The series is particularly concerned with examining the material means and structures of movement, as well as the infrastructures that surround such movement, with a focus on transport, travel, postcolonialism, and/or embodiment. While we expect many titles from literary scholars who draw upon research originating in cultural geography and/or sociology in order to gain valuable new insights into literary and cultural texts, proposals are equally welcome from scholars working in the social sciences who make use of literary and cultural texts in their theorizing. The series invites monographs that engage with textual materials of all kinds-i.e., film, photography, digital media, and the visual arts, as well as fiction, poetry, and other literary forms-and projects engaging with non-western literatures and cultures are especially welcome.
Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture, 2021
Displacement and borders have featured in the book so far, and in this chapter the border is enco... more Displacement and borders have featured in the book so far, and in this chapter the border is encountered in the form of physical barriers such as security fences, heavily policed coastal waters and the boundaries of the nation-state in Europe with its powerful legacy of coloniality pushing borders further and further into Africa. Although the majority of those migrating in Africa move within the continent, sufficient numbers have attempted to enter Europe and the US to the extent that this movement of people, together with those from the Middle East, has produced a far-right populist backlash constructed around the ‘immigrant’ who is seen as part of a calculated replacement of ‘ethnic’ (white) Europeans or, in the US, as an agent of ‘white genocide’. A brief exploration of this phase of populism will constitute the opening sections of the chapter, followed by an analysis of Those Who Jump (2016) and The Gurugu Pledge (2017), a film and a novel set on the African/EU border in Morocco...
Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture, 2021
Waiting and immobility, together with detainment, form the most common experience for most refuge... more Waiting and immobility, together with detainment, form the most common experience for most refugees when, or if, they manage to reach a place where they can be considered for asylum. This chapter focuses, initially, on two films—one a feature (Escape to Paradise, 2001), the other a documentary (La Forteresse, 2008)—both set in Switzerland in the first part of this century. Delay, obstruction and a culture of disbelief characterise their experience of seeking asylum in a convoluted and hostile system. The second half of the chapter concentrates upon an even greater culture of endless waiting, disbelief and hostility, this time in the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre, Papua New Guinea, which is, effectively, an Australian offshore prison for the warehousing of refugees. This experience is recorded in the remarkable ‘auto-ethnography’ of Behrouz Boochani: No Friend but the Mountains (2019).
Creating Destruction, 2011
Beast, Vermin, Insect-Hate Media and the Construction of the Enemy: The Case of Rwanda, 1990-1994... more Beast, Vermin, Insect-Hate Media and the Construction of the Enemy: The Case of Rwanda, 1990-1994 Roger Bromley For Emma and Jonah, children of hope Abstract This chapter was prompted by a poem by Sam Keen,'To Create an Enemy', in which the 'other'is ...
Cover Stories Narrative and ideology in the British spy thriller by Michael Denning Combining cul... more Cover Stories Narrative and ideology in the British spy thriller by Michael Denning Combining cultural history with narrative analysis, Michael Denning tracks the spy thriller from John Buchan to Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming and John Le Carré, and shows how these tales tell a history of our times, and attempt to resolve crises and contradictions in ideologies of nation and empire, of class Series editors' preface There are many good reasons for studying popular fiction. The best, though, is that it matters. In the many and varied forms in which they are produced and circulated-by the cinema, broadcasting institutions and the publishing industry-popular fictions saturate the rhythms of everyday life. In doing so, they help to define our sense of our selves, shaping our desires, fantasies, imagined pasts and projected futures. An understanding of such fictions-of how they are produced and circulated, organized and received-is thus central to an understanding of our selves; of how these selves have been shaped and of how they might be changed. This series is intended to contribute to such an understanding by providing a context in which different traditions and directions in the study of popular fiction might be brought into contact so as to interanimate one another. It will thus range across the institutions of cinema, broadcasting and publishing, seeking to illuminate both their respective specificities as well as the relations between them with a view to identifying the ways in which popular film, television and writing interact as parts of developed cultural technologies for the formation of subjectivities. Consideration of the generic properties of popular fiction will thus be situated within an analysis of viii Series editors' preface their historical and institutional conditions of production and reception. Similarly, the series will represent, and coordinate a debate between, the diverse political perspectives through which the study of popular fiction has been shaped and defined in recent years. Feminist studies of the part popular fictions play in the production of gendered subjectivities and relations; Marxist perspectives on the relations between popular fictions and class formations; popular fiction as a site for the reproduction and contestation of subordinate racial and national identities: in encompassing contributions from these often sharply contrasting traditions of thought the series will explore the complex and intertwining web of political relations in which the production and reception of popular fictions are involved. It should be clear, though, that in all this our aim is not to transform popular fiction into something else-into literature, say, or art cinema. If the study of popular fiction matters it is because what is ultimately at stake in such analysis is the production of a better popular fiction as well as of better, politically more productive ways of reading it.
Journal of Aesthetics & Culture, 2017
How, and at what point, does a person, or a group of people, described as migrant or of migrant o... more How, and at what point, does a person, or a group of people, described as migrant or of migrant origin, cease to be thought of as migrants or exclusively in terms of their ethnicity? This article responds to this question by exploring a range of theoretical arguments in relation to what has come to be called postmigration. The emphasis is on second and third generation "migrants", born in their country of residence, and on the ways in which through developing new cultural and representational practices they seek to go beyond confining and essentialising definitions which have an "othering" effect. At the same time, it is acknowledged that those of the first generation may also be engaged in a similar struggle to find agency in forms of the future. In speculating on possible meanings of postmigration, two texts will be examined, one a work of fiction, the other a social and cultural survey, which implicitly or explicitly address ways of transcending the limits of minority ascription in the context of racism, xenophobia, traditionalism, and Islamophobia.
Altre Modernità, Nov 23, 2014
Journal for Cultural Research, 2015
The aim of this article is to draw a few theoretical links between writing and revolution, whilst... more The aim of this article is to draw a few theoretical links between writing and revolution, whilst exploring how the acts of writing/witnessing/remembering can metaphorically ‘give memory a future’ in Paul Ricoeur’s words. The article situates the two memoirs of Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif Cairo: My City, Our Revolution and Syrian novelist Samar Yazbek A Woman in the Crossfire: Diaries of the Syrian Revolution and their first-hand experience of the uprisings in Egypt and Syria within the genre of writing and memory. I argue that these writers combine reflexive observation with eyewitness testimony and in each there is a staging, a performative act of memory-making, in the sense that they are constructing a present for remembering, with the writer as witness within a ‘we-memory’ community. The writers are conscious of the historicity of the moment and are endeavouring to produce what might be called legacy writing.
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 02690058508574080, Jul 18, 2008