Locating Refuge

• In Event: Domestic Empires: Aftermath, Endurance, and Refuge in the Militarized City

Abstract

"Philadelphia has a long history of being a city of refuge for those in need - welcoming Quakers, Irish immigrants, Sudanese refugees, and many others," said Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney in 2016, responding to questions about the Syrian refugee crisis with a promise to continue participating in refugee resettlement. Philadelphia has, indeed, long been a haven for migrants seeking refuge, having resettled up to 1000 refugees annually in recent decades. My dissertation project, titled "Racializing Refuge: Forced Migration and the Making of Philadelphia," asks what it means for Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love (and Sisterly Affection), to be a city of refuge, exploring how the city's history affects how and when humanitarian processes of refuge-making unfold.

The figure of the refugee - and the humanitarian practices of making refuge that it requires - is an important analytical tool for understanding processes of belonging in the United States, operating as a paradigm with which we may highlight social and political problems (Espiritu 2006) through critical juxtaposition (Espiritu 2017). Taking up this call, I follow Keith Feldman in framing the refugee as a relational figure, a specter mobilized to the ends of both moral obligation and militarized security whose involvement in racial project-making highlights the foundational structures of American society, from American imperialism to the foundational black-white racial binary (Feldman 2014). I utilize a relational analytic that juxtaposes two racialized processes of humanitarian migration: the reception of recognized refugees deemed legitimate by the UN and responses to the Great Migration, a large-scale movement that is generally considered unrelated to the history of forced migration.

This paper, "Locating Refuge," draws upon ethnographic research and a diverse archive of displacement to Philadelphia to consider the spatiality of refuge. Philadelphia as an historic immigrant destination and Sanctuary City constructed through multiple racialized displacements, with migrants interacting with local arrangements of differentially-resourced Philadelphia communities. The paper centers the story of my interlocutor Garuna, a Burmese refugee, and her migratory journey from resettlement in South Philadelphia to the suburbs, describing Garuna's movement as a consequence of the affective racial geography of Philadelphia neighborhoods, dynamics that pit Southeast Asian refugees against Black Americans. Putting her migration in relationship with oral histories of the Great Migration, I suggest that actors like Garuna cannot but invest, through affectively-laden movement, in the very frameworks that continue to thwart their attainment of refuge: the spatialized carceral imaginary of the city, meritocracy, and the attainment of the American Dream.

Trajectories like Garuna's are shaped by the racialized imaginary that so structures social life in American contexts. These migrations show us that refugees and other displaced subjects are not only racialized themselves - although they certainly are⁠ - but also indicates how racialized modes of thinking and feeling the world are part of how migrants explore their surroundings as they take shape, meaning they too must racially position others in order to survive in an urban context marked by the legacies of racialization and carceral imaginaries.

Author

• Michelle Munyikwa, University of Pennsylvania