In the wake of the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the anti-migrant hostility he unleashed, I developed an engaged scholarship course in French and Francophone Studies at Brown University. This course grew out of a personal response to this political crisis, drawing me away from my research specialization in early modern France to the here and now. I did not set out to offer a course on French policies of asylum or immigration, a subject taught at Brown in other departments and beyond my expertise; nor did I set out to study immigration in France, frequently taught in my department and others across the United States—a subject, to be sure, with its own urgency given decades of anti-immigrant vitriol on the French right.

Rather, I wanted to work with members of the Providence community who had themselves experienced displacement and who had ties to the Francophone world. I hoped to give students an opportunity to engage on a very local, interpersonal level while studying influential writers and theorists from the French tradition (Camus, Derrida, Djebar, and Agier) in a seminar format. The intended audience consisted of students with advanced proficiency in French as well as training in the Humanities and who were therefore prepared to read, interpret, and discuss works of cultural theory in French.

This resulted in a course on Refugees and Forced Migration offered through French and Francophone Studies, conceived with a broad Humanities frame (drawing on literary studies, history, philosophy, film studies, and anthropology) and grounded in a community partnership with Women’s Refugee Care (WRC), an NGO devoted to supporting African refugees resettled in Rhode Island. Now in its fifth year, this course remains very much a partnership: it relies on the charisma and determination of WRC’s two directors, Aline Binyungu and Clément Shabani, and on the extraordinary talent and initiative students bring to the course. It has come to function as a bridge between Brown students and Central Africans recently resettled in Providence, bringing together two communities that would otherwise remain separate.

As the following discussion shows, this project comes with its own challenges. In the first place, students’ time commitments, with tight schedules dictated by the university calendar, make it difficult to establish longer-term relationships with members of the community. Moreover, these relationships are also vulnerable to breakage and therefore require vigilant, imaginative work to sustain reciprocity. Finally, unlike the other Humanities courses I have offered in the past, this course has a real-world grounding that can sometimes surface in painful ways, as when a woman in the community who was seeking divorce was murdered by her husband the first year the course was offered. Taking to heart this volume’s commitment to offering a toolkit for student-centered initiatives and community engagement, the following pages relate how the vital partnership on which this course now relies was built, before discussing its structure and several key notions that have emerged.

Points of Departure

When I set out to design this course, I had no previous experience with community-engaged courses. Nor did I possess any scholarly expertise in the emerging field of forced migration. (May this full disclosure be taken as an invitation to others who might wish to develop such a course!) During the preceding summer, I worked with an undergraduate student supported by a summer grant from the university to explore possible course designs, which entailed both reading broadly on the subject of migration and displacement and reaching out to social workers and others engaged with the refugee community in Providence. The most fruitful of our initial exploratory meetings was with the director of community outreach at Dorcas International Institute, a very large organization that provides essential services to immigrant and refugee communities in Rhode Island. Their program encompasses all aspects of life, from resettlement and citizenship applications to medical services, housing, and ESL.

Through Dorcas’ community outreach director, I learned about Women’s Refugee Care, a smaller organization, recently created to serve the community of African refugees in Providence by two members of this community who were themselves recently resettled in Providence. Clément Shabani and Aline Binyungu (married), both social workers from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), were forced to flee their country in 2006, escaping first to Rwanda and then to Thailand, where they spent seven years in a refugee camp. Their youngest son was born in this camp, where conditions were extremely difficult. They arrived in Providence having both been educated (it remains unusual for women in the DRC to receive a formal education), speaking fluent French but very little English, and with considerable experience as social workers which they sought to bring to bear on their new circumstances.Footnote 1 As the name they chose for their organization suggests, the directors of Women’s Refugee Care have a deep commitment to women’s rights, begun years ago when they focused on empowering women and girls in rural communities of the Democratic Republic of Congo—a segment of the population that lacks basic rights and is, as a result, highly vulnerable. They continue to advocate for women through their work in Providence today, which ranges from support for women seeking employment (application and interview preparation) to child care as well as weekly meetings of the women’s group. Perhaps even more vital, however, is the informal support they provide in a myriad of ways, making their office a hub for the community.

In the initial conversations I had with Binyungu, we looked for ways Brown students could contribute to the lives of the families in their community and arrived at a list of projects that now lie at the heart of the course. The roughly twenty students each take part in a small-group project pursued throughout the semester (and sometimes beyond) in conjunction with the activities of WRC. These small-group projects include tutoring young children, organizing weekend activities for the youth group, participating in the weekly meetings of the women’s group, providing office support, organizing fundraisers on campus (including a Congolese dance performance by WRC’s youth group in 2018), and creating documentary videos and other materials for the website. The first semester the seminar was offered, several particularly talented students from Film Studies created WRC’s informational video, consisting of an interview with Binyungu that has remained on the website ever since.Footnote 2

The community engagement in this course is thus rooted in the small-group projects, which operate semi-autonomously throughout the semester. Each group offers regular (weekly) updates to the entire seminar, discussing projects under way and bringing to the group difficulties as they emerge. These exchanges also offer an occasion to seek advice (soliciting ideas for a fundraising event on campus or suggestions for tutoring a teenager in difficulty, for instance). Needless to say, this course requires considerable independence and maturity from students, and those who take the course are self-selecting. The course would not be possible without the talent, initiative, and commitment the students bring to it. Nor would it be viable without the mentoring provided by the directors of WRC, who spontaneously adopt a teacherly role with students in addition to their strong, sustaining presence within their community.

In one instance, we witnessed the need for the culturally sensitive support that WRC is able to offer within this community, a need that goes well beyond material concerns such as the winter coats and school supplies that WRC regularly provides. In this instance, tragedy struck one of the families in the community when a Congolese woman initiating divorce was murdered by her husband, who left the body hidden in the closet of the house where she lived with their children. None of the students in the seminar was working with the family in question. Nevertheless, it was a traumatic event for the community at large. After the funeral, members of the community gathered for a meal and memorial service, which I attended along with some students from the course. As pastors and male members of the community took the floor, their comments were less focused on the tragedy inflicted on a woman in the community than on challenges for their more traditional family structures posed by living in the United States, where divorce is common and where the husband is not guaranteed the same privileges as head of the family. It was shocking for my students (and for me) to hear the blame for this murder being shifted from the husband’s actions to American cultural values. Observing this event brought home how central a role WRC plays in the community given the directors’ experience with gender issues and commitment to women’s rights along with the privilege of being themselves cultural insiders. The events of this semester were also a sobering reminder that, out of the millions of people seeking asylum, for those who are lucky enough to obtain this endangered status, resettlement is not a happy end, but rather a new chapter in the struggle.

Syllabus

Alongside the ongoing projects taking place in small groups, students in the seminar follow a syllabus that begins with a brief survey of forms of migration and its corollaries (exile, immigration, displacement, errancy) followed by a closer focus on the history of political asylum drawing on the work of the French historian Gérard Noiriel (Réfugiés et sans papiers, 1991), supplemented by lectures in class (all in French). The next part of the course features invited speakers who address the contemporary political context in the United States as well as the circumstances that brought refugees from Central Africa to the United States. Among those speakers was Emily Gogolak, a former student who is now a journalist working on migration issues, and Binyungu and Shabani, who offer a guest lecture relating their own story of persecution and displacement while describing the challenges families in their community face. The remaining class meetings are devoted to three topics. We first examine postcolonial contexts in Africa, reading the work of Albert Camus and Assia Djebar. We then turn to the experience of displacement and being undocumented through four films: Georges Perec’s essayistic documentary, Ellis Island (1980); Yamina Benguigui’s documentary based solely on interviews, Mémoires d’immigrés (1997); Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne’s La Promesse (1996); and Nadine Labaki’s Capharnaüm (2018). Finally, alongside our primary corpus, we examine the work of several theorists: Hannah Arendt’s “We Refugees” (1943), Jacques Derrida’s On Hospitality (1997), and Les Migrants et nous (2016) by Michel Agier, an influential French ethnologist who studies the contemporary phenomenon of migration and borderlands. Course discussions often place a theoretical work alongside a film or literary text. This final section will examine two such pairings.

On Hospitality: Camus (and Derrida)

Practices of political asylum are rooted in ancient notions of hospitality as well as in political and legal institutions and religious traditions, for the ethical imperative of hospitality is present in historical Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as in Ancient Greece and Rome. Long before the modern bureaucratic state claimed the right to police movement across borders or grant asylum to foreigners, the gods extended their protection to foreigners seeking hospitality or to places of sanctuary for those in need. Jacques Derrida examines the cultural and ethical ideal of hospitality, detecting an underlying ambivalence between the term hostis (“enemy”) and hospes (“guest” or “host”). Derrida forges the term hostipitality (merging “hostility” with “hospitality”) to convey this foundational ambivalence, for when the foreigner is welcomed as a “guest,” there is a latent hostility that can easily transform hosts and guests into enemies. The drama of hostipitality plays out over and over, Derrida suggests, not because of historical contingencies, but because of this foundational ambivalence.

With this analysis in mind, I invite students to observe the logic of hostipitality at work in Albert Camus’s short story L’hôte (which could be translated as “The host” or “The guest”) in L’Exil et le royaume (Exiles and the Kingdom, 1957). This story’s protagonist is a man named Daru, a French-Algerian elementary school teacher living in a remote region of Algeria on the eve of the war for independence. When Daru is called upon to transport an Arab arrested for having murdered his cousin to the colonial authorities, he first offers him hospitality in his home, thereby treating his “prisoner” as a “guest.” Daru respects the ritual of hospitality to the letter, offering his guest everything he might need: a comfortable bed, a shared meal, and even the means to escape rather than to submit to the authorities. And yet, all the while, Daru views his guest with a latent hostility, justified first in the name of the man’s crime and then by his unwillingness to take the opportunity for freedom that Daru offers him. His solidarity with this man in the name of an ethical code of hospitality and a philosophical ideal of freedom is fraught, compromised, and ultimately sabotaged. When he returns home, Daru is, moreover, greeted with a threat as someone has written on the blackboard of his classroom, “you turned in our brother” (Daru did not in fact escort the man to the police, but rather placed him at the crossroads of a choice between escaping to live with the nomads or turning himself in), followed by an ominous “you will pay.” The last image is of Daru gazing into the hostile landscape he called home, an allegory of the plight of the pieds noirs.Footnote 3 Derrida’s notion of hostipitality casts a somber light on the ideal of hospitality, which is seemingly always already sabotaged, ready to collapse into hostility.

Evoking Derrida on hospitality thus leads, as one might have predicted, to an impasse. In contrast, Michel Agier, a French anthropologist and theorist of contemporary migration, explores how a bond of solidarity might be formed between a host and a guest (or, as he phrases it, between an “established person” and a “migrant”).

On Forging the Bonds of Solidarity: La Promesse (and Agier)

Set in the world of undocumented labor exploitation, La Promesse (The Promise, 1996), a film of social realism by the Dardenne brothers, tells the story of a young Belgian boy named Igor, whose father runs a construction business based on the exploitation of undocumented migrants. Igor is being groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps, but this pattern of social reproduction is interrupted when he forges an unlikely bond of solidarity with an undocumented African woman. Michel Agier’s Les Migrants et nous (Migrants and Us, 2016) elucidates the nature of this solidarity, as well as its limits.

A small book that seems almost tailor-made to our seminar, Agier’s Les Migrants et nous begins with a preface devoted to what was commonly presented in the press as “the refugee crisis.” (In the United States at this time, Trump was undertaking his campaign to build border walls and turn away or imprison asylum seekers.) Yet Agier’s book is not devoted to denouncing nativism. Rather, Agier speaks directly to “us”—the “insiders” or the “established” who wish to act in solidarity with migrants—examining three motivations that inspire “the established” to help migrants: suffering, identity, and difference. Agier’s analysis of each of these motivations draws on the work of the French sociologist Marcel Mauss and, more specifically, on his notion of the reciprocity of gift-giving as the basis of all social relationships developed in The Gift (Essais sur le don, 1923–1924). Seminar discussion begins by examining Igor’s motivations in La Promesse before extending Agier’s model to ourselves, for the ethnologist’s critique hits close to home for the participants in the seminar whose motivations might, indeed, coincide with what Agier terms the three “causes.” Since I, too, am implicated by Agier’s critique, I can use myself as an example, asking the following: What lies behind my wish to help the community of Central African refugees in Providence?

Perhaps I am moved by their foreignness, coming from a life so far removed from my own. The problem with this motivation “in the name of difference,” which Agier terms “the exotic cause,” is precisely that it implies a separation, imposing distance while flirting with an aestheticization of the other.

Perhaps I am instead motivated by a similarity between their story and my own. Insofar as my mother left her home to make a life in a faraway (and sometimes hostile) land, displacement is part of my own self-narrative. A common refrain with a certain poetic truth embraced by activists defending asylum seekers is, indeed, “we are all the children of refugees.” The problem with this “common identity cause,” Agier reminds us, is that it is an effacement of the other, on whom I project my own desires.

Finally, Agier’s most piercing critique is reserved for what he terms “the humanitarian cause” which justifies helping migrants in the name of their suffering. We are still haunted by the stories of refugees piled into rafts attempting to escape impossible conditions at home and by the 2015 photograph of the body of a Syrian toddler, Aylan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach. Each of the families in the WRC community has experienced tragedy, and often violence. This experience was indeed the basis for their applications for asylum, the DRC being a country devastated by civil war. But if we (the students, the professor) arrive, moved by the stories of suffering, with the hope of “helping” through our humanitarianism, we are by this very gesture forestalling a true relationship. The charitable gift, Agier argues through Mauss, leaves no room for reciprocity. It implies the absence and the silence of the other, reduced to “receiving” but prevented from “giving.” This is not only potentially humiliating; it is also an obstacle to forging a social relationship and to building solidarity. Here, I offer a story from the first year the seminar was offered, when the Directors of WRC shared with me a problem that had arisen: some of the students tutoring in the homes of families had offended these families when they declined refreshments. Refusing a glass of orange juice and some peanuts might seem trivial, but, in effect, this was perceived as a humiliating refusal of the gift that was being offered to them. This refusal reduced the relationship to humanitarianism, intercepting the gesture of hospitality that sought to introduce reciprocity. This Maussian lesson has direct bearing on students’ projects, challenging them to find ways to close the circle of hospitality by receiving what might be offered in a spirit of generosity. Potential gifts are not restricted to material offerings (refreshments, for instance), but rather include the talents, skills, and expertise (Swahili language, cooking, dance) that might be shared in the context of a tutoring lesson, a community gathering, or a meeting of the women’s group.

Afterword

Refugees and Forced Migration represents for me an experiment I never imagined myself attempting. In the first place, it pulled me out of my research specialization built over some 30 years while introducing me to community-engaged teaching, requiring me to stretch and grow as best I can. But it is also experimental in its design insofar as it brings together the study of classics of the French intellectual tradition with community service in Providence. Needless to say, Jacques Derrida, Albert Camus, and Assia Djebar do not offer a user’s manual for “community service”—indeed, in the case of the former, deconstruction has been attacked for being disconnected from social and political engagement. It is in any case safe to assume that such figures rarely find themselves on the syllabi of community-engaged courses. To be sure, they offer no guidance directly applicable to students’ community projects—which must then be sought in other ways when circumstances arise. At the same time, reading such works in the context of community engagement represents a “challenge” in the best possible sense, for it promotes an attitude of self-reflection and self-critique, a wariness that is a salutary corrective to uncritical “do-goodism.” The French intellectual tradition’s embrace of negativity—of suggesting, for instance, the “hostility” always potentially lurking within hospitality (Derrida) or uncovering the failure of “humanitarianism” to offer a satisfactory response to forced migration (Agier)—thus has its own virtues, especially in a community engagement course.