In Refugee Voices, Rob Sharp explores how refugees in the UK use creative media to express themselves and their experiences. Through detailed fieldwork in Cardiff and Tyneside, Sharp’s nuanced and important intervention reveals the challenges that refugees face in finding their voices when their self-expression is mediated through institutions, writes Rodrigo Muñoz-González.
Refugee Voices: Performativity and the Struggle for Recognition. Rob Sharp. Routledge. 2024.
Our society is made up of multiple voices. From the quotidian to the political, our lives entail interactions with distinct points of view, identities, and personal histories. This interaction, nevertheless, is tied to struggles for recognition which highlight the precarious situations of certain social groups and communities, such as women, migrants, or the LGBTIQ+ community. Depending on who we are, and where we come from, we gain opportunities of being more visible and having privileged places in different sectors. Voice, then, encompasses the ability to speak and be heard, an ability which is not shared equally across contemporary society.
In Refugee Voices: Performativity and the Struggle for Recognition, Rob Sharp explores how refugees in the United Kingdom negotiate their identities and engage with initiatives that promise to give them a voice. Sharp focuses on projects that, through creative media such as film, painting, and other artistic forms, allow refugee populations to express themselves and work out their relationship with their past and their host country. As such, Sharp unpacks the frictions and tensions within efforts of creative mediation sponsored by diverse governmental agencies and other institutions such as NGOs. For this, the book’s analysis is based on empirical fieldwork conducted with refugees in community centres located in Cardiff and Tyneside. This enables a rich account of their own perspectives and experiences, told through their own voices.
The book’s analysis is based on empirical fieldwork conducted with refugees in community centres located in Cardiff and Tyneside. This enables a rich account of their own perspectives and experiences, told through their own voices.
Theoretically, Refugee Voices is an important intervention in debates concerning voice, recognition and mediation. Sharp wrests his argument from normative frameworks that define voice in Eurocentric and hegemonic terms; instead, he proposes to understand voice as an ambiguous form of agency that can be both linear and non-linear, rational and affective, defined and messy. For him, voice is within but also goes beyond narratives; it is often enacted outside official vocabularies or actual languages through silences or other more corporeal sensibilities. In this respect, the book’s main achievement is its conceptualisation of “performative refugeeness” to comprehend the modes by which refugees navigate promises of voice and have the possibility of breaking with dominant standpoints of what voice means. The experience of being a refugee, then, is inspected as a complex articulation of social discourses (amongst which media plays a pivotal role) institutional and legal infrastructures, and identities that comprise memories from personal pasts and hopes for the future.
Sharp’s work stands out for its commitment to scrutinising all the nuances and contradictions involved when refugees seek to express their own voices.
Methodologically, Sharp’s work stands out for its commitment to scrutinising all the nuances and contradictions involved when refugees seek to express their own voices. In Cardiff and Tyneside, Sharp’s extensive fieldwork consisted of creative workshops with refugees, and multiple visits, meetings, and interviews conducted with audiences, local creative mediation professionals and centre staff. This allows the book to convincingly show how voice is not only a matter of self-expression or self-representation, but a struggle which is constructed publicly, anchored in the goals of myriad stakeholders. Indeed, many of the materials produced during the workshops are the basis for the analysis, generating a rich and detailed inspection of the creative processes through which refugees narrate explicitly their experiences and translate implicitly those affects and emotions that cannot be verbalised. Through drawings, collages, videos, storyboards, and group storytelling, Refugee Voices captures the complexities of being an asylum seeker and a refugee.
voice is not only a matter of self-expression or self-representation, but a struggle which is constructed publicly, anchored in the goals of myriad stakeholders.
Sharp builds his study through a heuristic method derived from three key terms: micro-, meso-, and macro-publicness. This permits him to examine how refugees create products that emerge from their biographic backgrounds but that might be aimed to engage with wider audiences and depict distinct relationships with society at large. Refugee Voices suggests that self-representation through creative mediations does not entail a genuine promise of voice. Notwithstanding the fact that these efforts depart from their creativity, refugees strive to maintain a balance between their desires and several gatekeeper’s expectations. Otherwise put, projects which promise voice are caught in institutional networks that make difficult an authentic expression and communication from refugees.
Furthermore, Sharp argues that self-representation through creative mediation does not guarantee a complete recognition or encapsulation of refugee experience. If we accept that recognition involves endorsing what is important to people, in this case individuals are firstly defined as refugees, instead of being defined as human beings. Again, this brings about situations in which their condition of being a refugee overpowers every other aspect of their identities, evidencing the analytical purchase of “performative refugeeness” as a concept. The book also interrogates how participation is facilitated and regulated in creative mediation. Refugees are more willing to engage in these projects when they are allowed to set their own terms – ie, when they are able to decide logistic and organisational aspects of the workshops. As Sharp contends, rejections and negotiations are important moments when working with refugees, moments that are regularly missing from scholarly literature and that have the potential of fostering real dialogue and understanding.
Refugees are more willing to engage in these projects when they are allowed to set their own terms – ie, when they are able to decide logistic and organisational aspects of the workshops. As Sharp contends, rejections and negotiations are important moments
Refugee Voices provides a powerful and incisive argument for examining and, most importantly, understanding refugees as complex and nuanced people – the book makes a plea for us to acknowledge their humanity. Although it is located in the UK, Sharp’s argument can be used to make sense of contemporary dilemmas in both the Global North and South. For instance, the migratory movements from Central America to the United States comprise people travelling overland routes and long distances and are marked by a broad repertoire of discourses, institutions, and governments. In this context, and employing Sharp’s approach, we could think of a “performative migrantness” to parse this interplay of actors and struggles for recognition and dignity.
As Sharp contends, to have a voice means to have a place in the world, to be granted the possibility of changing it. This is a book that compels readers to imagine better ways to interact with those who have suffered and been forced to flee their homes. In the end, to hear each other’s voice is to accept that our differences matter and should be embraced.
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Shatila Art, Tynemouth Metro Station © Andrew Curtis on Geograph.org.uk. Licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
