Abstract

Refugees are possibly the most creative people. Forced to move by any number of pressures — military, social, political, economic — they make perilous journeys to places safer than those of their origin, which may nevertheless be fraught with danger. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai states that as refugees move through shifting contexts and “can never afford to let their imaginations rest too long, even if they wished to.” The requirement for refugees to “build worlds” in response to the destruction of their homes — places that have constituted their worlds for years — highlights both their closeness to, and their distance from, those into whose worlds refugees now impact. We all need to build worlds, but for some this imaginative requirement is more pressing. This is a moment of heightened importance for the many senses of dignity, subjectification and anticipation that Hannah Arendt had already noted.