Refugee Lives in the Archives: A Pacific Imaginary (New Directions in Life Narrative)

This book introduces the unique archive of letters, textiles, hand-drawn maps, emails and photographs from asylum seekers held indefinitely in offshore detention at Topside Camp, Nauru 2001-5.These artefacts introduce the distinctive and creative forms of resistance produced by asylum seekers in the remote Pacific camps on Nauru and Manus Island, and they expose their experiential histories of radical suffering and trauma.Paying due deference to the creative and aesthetic agency of these various documents and artefacts created by the undocumented here, Gillian Whitlock generates a cultural biography of the Nauru camp that humanizes those who have remained unseen and unheard, and features the activist campaigns and the political resistance that assert the agency of witnessing refugees.Structured around the collections of various artefacts exchanged between detainees and humanitarian activists, Refugee Lives in the Archives draws on emerging theories from detention centres and the asylum