Re-placing the Accent: From the Exile to Refugee Position Timothy K. August Stony Brook University There is something disquieting about the aesthetic qualities that accompany and define the refugee experience. At first, the refugee is produced, detained, and con- tained at a distance, unable to fully inhabit the nearness necessary for intimate understanding—visible without being knowable. The refugee figure is subse- quently asked to transform this isolated position into a phantasmic entity, disap- pearing from plain sight when incorporated into the national body. From there, the trace of the refugee is circulated around legal categories and political debates instead of being crafted into an inhabitable subjectivity. This discursive shift rationalizes refugee bodies, camps, and voices as transitory administrative phe- nomena, enabling the spectator to turn away from the refugee experience with the passing of time. Due to the unsavory prejudices that circumscribe the refugee in everyday life, communities are eager to leave the image of the powerless refugee behind. Even authors rarely attempt to intervene in the aestheticization of refugee life; for them, the refugee position is a temporary bureaucratic identity to be over- come. Particularly during the first wave of migration and settlement, writers are more likely to publicly announce their successful arrival in the new land than dwell on their condition as refugee subjects. However, the aesthetic discourse surrounding the refugee is undergoing a pro- found transformation, as a number of Southeast Asian American authors are cur- rently embracing the refugee position to document the lingering contradictions that their station entails. These Southeast Asian American authors are producing a body of literature that both invites and critiques dominant culture, elongating the temporality of the refugee condition so that the past is not simply left behind when political designations are removed. By extending the event of the refugee experience, they revisit, interpret, and recontextualize the material pressures that continue to affect their community. Attending to the aesthetics and politics involved in representing the refugee experience reveals the common ground that exists between their own and other refugee communities—a powerful action that calls out the role the US empire continues to play in driving a global history of displacement. The new refugee aesthetic consists of three primary characteristics: authors respond to the demand to explain one’s presence, gesture toward social ...................................................................................................... ß MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlw028 MELUS  Volume 41  Number 3  (Fall 2016) 68 by guest on September 20, 2016 http://melus.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from