Gift or gilded cage? Performing gratitude and the "respectability politics of refuge"

This paper theorizes the "Respectability Politics of Refuge" in the landscape of U.S. discourse and policy on refugee resettlement. We examine how the nation-state frames refuge as a conditional "gift" demanding repayment. The very bodies of forcibly displaced people become fungi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inCommunication and critical/cultural studies Vol. 22; no. 2; pp. 180 - 198
Main Authors Ghazal Aswad, Noor, Partain, Laura
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Routledge 03.04.2025
Subjects
displacement
political communication
refuge
refugee
Respectability politics
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Summary:This paper theorizes the "Respectability Politics of Refuge" in the landscape of U.S. discourse and policy on refugee resettlement. We examine how the nation-state frames refuge as a conditional "gift" demanding repayment. The very bodies of forcibly displaced people become fungible through performances of deference to power. Drawing on in-depth interviews, we delineate two mechanisms of this politics: Accommodation and Refusal. Accommodation captures the adaptive responses of refugees who enact depoliticized gratitude, supporting the nation-state's self-image and geopolitics. Refusal resistance that challenges ascribed roles and unsettles gratitude expectations through mutual aid, communal solidarities, or acts of insubordination that redefine the political. By conceptualizing both strategies along a continuum, we underscore seeking refuge as a fraught balancing act that oscillates between the exigencies of survival and the urge to act of one's own will.
ISSN:1479-1420
1479-4233
DOI:10.1080/14791420.2025.2505630