Rejection of Victimhood in Literature: By Abdulrazak Gurnah, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Luis Alberto Urrea

Transnational writers are increasingly opposed to representations of refugees, exiles, migrants, and their descendants as emblematic victims. With the rise of populist nationalisms in the USA and the UK in the eras of Trumpism, Brexit, and their aftermath, targets of nationalist groups have increasingly been represented, and thus constituted, as individual suffering victims. Certain groups embrace such representations. They use them to secure help and protection for themselves. Less scrupulous individuals may even embrace these representations to elide their own accountability and further nefarious goals. This book examines an intriguing selection of writers to show how they are attempting to recalibrate such stories to reject victimhood. It explores how just memory is deployed to ascribe agency to transnational characters.