Blessed and Banned: Surveillance and Refusal in Somali Diasporic Art & Literature

Authors

  • Danielle Haque Minnesota State University, Mankato Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24847/v9i12022.311

Keywords:

Somali Anglophone literature, literatures of diaspora, migration literature, Arab Anglopohone literature

Abstract

This essay examines the work of twenty-first century Somali Anglophone writers and artists, analyzing how they confront the connected experiences of displacement, migration, and surveillance. I interpret the work of Warsan Shire, Diriye Osman, Ladan Osman, and Ifrah Mansour as embodying place-based transnationalisms that resist stereotypical media and political representations of Somali refugees as invasive and dangerous, especially gendered clichés of Somali, Muslim men as inherently violent and Somali, Muslim women as universally oppressed. Through writing, art, and performance, these works reveal how the state prevents communities from caring for one another through state apparatuses, and articulate instead a right to mutuality and care-taking.

Author Biography

  • Danielle Haque, Minnesota State University, Mankato

    Danielle Haque is an associate professor of English at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She is the author of Interrogating Secularism: Race and Religion in Arab Transnational Literature and Art (Syracuse University Press, 2019). You can read her writing on Arab and Muslim American literature in American Literature, MELUS, American Quarterly, and Sajjilu Arab American: A Reader in SWANA Studies.

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Published

2022-02-15