Re-Imagining Diaspora Through Ethno-Mimesis: Humiliation, Human Dignity and Belonging

Abstract

This chapter builds upon the author’s work on renewed methodologies for conducting ethnographic research with asylum seekers and refugee groups in the UK and explores the political implications of ‘ethnomimesis’ as critical theory in practice. Concepts of ‘diaspora’, ‘humiliation’ and ‘dignity’ will be problematised and explored through the analysis of hybrid texts (art forms) produced by refugees and asylum seekers in the inter-relation/inter-textuality between art and ethnography — as ethno-mimesis. The author’s concept of ‘ethno-mimesis’ is defined in this chapter through a combination of participatory action research (PAR)¹ and participatory arts informed by the work of Adorno and Benjamin. Ethno-mimesis draws upon ‘feeling forms’ such as photographic art, performance art and life story narratives, and engages dialectically with lived experience through critical interpretation, towards social change. Ethno-mimesis as critical theory in praxis seeks to counter negative stereotypes in the public imagination and facilitate the production of refugee and asylum seekers self re-presentations of lived experiences through visual and biographical texts that speak of the utter complexity of lived relations through ‘feeling forms’ as ‘sensuous knowing’.

Here abroad nothing is left, we have been catapulted out of history, which is always the history of a specific area of the map, and we have to cope with, to use an expression of an exile writer, ‘the unbearable lightness of being’.

(Czeslaw Milosz 1988: 1–3)