Abstract
Voice, typically conceived as ‘the capacity to give an account of oneself’ (Sharp, 2024: 9), is a double-edged sword. Given that refugees’ voices are habitually marginalised and silenced, there is an urgent need to listen and centre them. However, as demonstrated by Tammas’ (2019) experience of sharing stories about leaving Syria, the pressure and expectations placed on refugees to tell (certain) stories raises the question: Who is this voice for? Refugee Voices: Performativity and the Struggle for Recognition (2024) builds on such critiques and upends the oft-assumed benefits of ‘the promises of refugee voice’. The book is based on creative mediation workshops with refugees and participant observation at two refugee organisations in Cardiff and Tyneside in the United Kingdom, supplemented by a discourse analysis of media coverage of creative mediation. At its core, it investigates ‘whether refugees gain a voice through such [creative] projects in practice, whether they are recognised and what might prevent voice or recognition from happening’ (p. 4). It provides an insightful analysis on the politics of refugee voice, revealing whose interests voice really serves, as well as the ways in which refugees are simultaneously recognised and misrecognised in different ways.
Creative mediation refers to creative initiatives where refugees engage in self-representation through artistic practices such as drawing, digital storytelling, craft and film. Refugees at the two sites were involved in various forms of creative mediation, including Hashem’s letter-writing, Amin’s fiction-writing, Basir’s video creation and group storytelling. Sharp uses this empirical data to examine the relationship between voice and creative mediation. As he argues, there is a need to theorise voice beyond representations in mainstream and social media, and beyond an understanding of voice as rational, linear (and primarily narrative) expressions of the self in the public sphere as conceptualised in liberal democratic approaches to the topic.
The book is interdisciplinary in its theoretical framework and multi-scalar in analysis. Three concepts used throughout the analysis chapters stand out: recognition, publicness and performative refugeeness. First, Sharp uses Axel Honneth’s (1995) concept of recognition, defined as acting ‘in a manner in which we are morally obligated by the features of a person’ (quoted in Sharp, 2024: 14). Honneth’s three kinds of recognition, love, legal recognition and social esteem, are used to analyse how recognition and voice interact in creative mediation. Importantly, Van Leeuwen’s (2007) ‘difference-respect’ is added as a fourth dimension to consider other forms of recognition beyond the state – a form of recognition refugees are frequently excluded from – that involves valuing refugees’ cultural backgrounds not for society’s sake but for refugees themselves. For example, Beatriz, a Ghanaian chef, proudly talked about growing covo in the centre’s garden, which she then used in her cooking. The practices of gardening and cooking enabled her to share knowledge about her culture with others, challenging the usually unequal relationship between British citizen volunteers at the centre and refugees. ‘Difference-respect’ also considers refugees’ refusal of the terms of recognition on offer, which Sharp argues is a form of voice. In his fieldwork, this manifested as refugees’ refusal to participate in the workshops due to potential detrimental effects on their asylum claims, fears of surveillance, and the impacts of racism and mistrust. Conceptualising acts of refusal as an expression of voice, and challenging conventional understandings of it, is one of the notable contributions of this book.
Second, publicness, ‘the process of gaining membership of a public’ (p. 22), provides a framework to examine how (mis)recognition operates at different scales. One of the findings is that voices are recognised in different ways at the levels of micropublicness (localised and intimate spaces such as the workshops or the centre), mesopublicness (at the regional level, beyond the immediate communities of refugees, volunteers or centre staff) and macropublicness (at the national level, such as national media). The larger the scale, the more constrained the space for refugees to express their voice on their own terms. It also means there is a higher risk of misrecognition.
Finally, ‘performative refugeeness’ is proposed as a concept that acknowledges the various constraints placed on refugee voice. It also encapsulates the possibilities for refugees to repeat, reinforce and break from dominant conceptions of voice as ‘rational, linear narrative expressions of the self’ (p. 10). The aforementioned example of Beatriz is one of many in the book where voice manifests not as narrative expression but as ‘smaller moments’ (p. 91). These moments expand conventional understandings of voice and engender self-esteem and difference-respect. Overall, performative refugeeness captures the complexity of voice. On the one hand, refugees perform their refugeeness as entrepreneurial, grateful or victimised subjects to an imagined audience, reproducing dominant discourses. On the other hand, creative mediation projects provide them with self-confidence and self-esteem, particularly at the scale of micropublicness. In observing how refugees perform ‘refugeeness’, Sharp also focuses on omissions. For instance, participants usually did not criticise the British state as part of their creative mediation, while many did so in private conversations. In this way, the methodological combination of creative mediation workshops and participant observation sheds light on how refugees negotiate their expressions of voice in different spaces.
The concluding chapter discusses the implications of the findings and avenues for further research, including the relationship between voice and small acts of resistance, and why and how performative refugeeness manifest in different spaces. I would like to suggest three more. If one of the purposes of cultural studies is to map power relations in a given social field to analyse how those relations are changing (Gilbert, 2019), there is potential for a conjunctural analysis of refugee voice that builds upon Sharp’s analysis. For example, Chapter 4 discusses how structural conditions of the arts sector, such as funding and elite gatekeeping, lead to issues like tokenism, and misrecognition of refugees when they were not treated as fellow artists in an exhibition. The book also mentions the connection between the performative refugeeness of an ‘entrepreneur’ and neoliberalism. There is potential to delve deeper into whether and how the funding landscape of the arts industry and refugee voice interact over a longer historical period, incorporating the broader social, economic and political conditions into the analysis.
Another potential avenue for further research is whether and how the form of media itself affects how refugees express their voice. For example, Amin chose to express himself through creative writing, declining to engage in video or drawings. There were other participants who preferred to engage with craft or spoken performance than creative media practices due to fears about surveillance. Sharp analyses the pieces refugees created in terms of the kinds of voice expressed and whether they were recognised through this work. Another avenue of inquiry is how different forms of media enable (or fail to enable) certain forms of voice, relations and (mis)recognition. This follows Towns’ (2022) call for a materialist media analysis that pays attention not only to the content of media but also how media produces new relations and ways of knowing the world. It also speaks to the issues of language and translation; while most refugees’ work were translated for an English-speaking audience, how do different forms of media involving varying levels of linguistic expression and translation make a difference to refugees’ self-representation?
There is also space for future studies to investigate the experiences of women and gender minority refugees. Sharp cites the low number of female participants as a limitation of this study, largely due to his positionality and the higher number of men seeking asylum in the United Kingdom. The finding that men were more likely to engage in individual forms of expression rather than group activities, and the expression of collective voice in a group storytelling session with women discussed in Chapter 5, form an interesting basis for future studies.
Refugee Voices will be of interest to practitioners working with refugees, as well as scholars working in the fields of media, arts, politics and migration. Many of the findings will be thought-provoking, and perhaps validating to practitioners who have questioned the assumed benefits of the promises of refugee voice. For instance, the finding that intimate spaces are more likely to provide opportunities for refugees to express their voices on their own terms acts as a call for organisations to think twice about seeking out broader public exposure. Doing away with the requirement to use English in workshops is another change that would enable refugees to engage in creative mediation on their own terms. The book therefore not only deconstructs ‘voice’. It also offers several ways to reimagine and reconstruct it for the benefit of refugees themselves.
