Abstract
This chapter explores belonging ontologically as a condition that rises with being. Pairing this firstly with looking at the Human Rights Declaration and the Refugee Convention not only determines the documents’ historical making through to their current practices, but also locates how ontological belonging becomes a practical and statutory question when seeking asylum. Secondly, I address ontological and statutory belonging against the formation of nations, nationality and the question of ‘the rights of the stateless in a world of states’ (Pupavac, Refugees in the ‘Sick Role’: Stereotyping Refugees and Eroding Refugee Rights. The UNHCR Policy Development and Evaluation Service New Issues (Research Paper No. 128): 1–24, 2006). The third section opens up a central current throughout this book by looking at how belonging is embedded and invested in narrative, and, conversely, how the asylum process is scripted, performed and relies on interpretive practices. Lastly, ‘compromised belonging’ is explored as a central term of this thesis, uncovering the compromises of belonging that become necessary and expected when seeking asylum and being a refugee.
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Notes
- 1.
The author biographies of the works read in this chapter note, for example, that Arendt fled to America during the war, while Améry was a part of the Resistance Movement, then captured and tortured by the SS and followingly incarcerated for two years in Auschwitz until the war ended. Weil was born in France to Jewish parents and was an activist with and among the working class, which is understood to have caused her premature death in 1943.
- 2.
The climate crisis raises home as an ecological urgency. Reading Heidegger in this perspective underscores how humans have profoundly not performed care for the very places supposed to home them. There is here an interesting connection to the dispossession of Indigenous land and climate debates: In 2016 members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released an article detailing that Indigenous perspectives have been under-represented in their reports, and portrayed them as ‘victims of the impacts of climate change’ (Ford et al. 2016, 350) rather than able to make vital contributions for countering the effects of climate change (2016, 350) through their knowledge of land. During the years this study was conducted, the 2018 IPCC report, featured four articles remarking on Indigenous knowledge and the centrality this should take in finding solutions (IPCC 2018). In 2019, the CNN published a multiple choice climate quiz in eight questions, where quizzers can rank what is deemed most and least effective for climate change. In the fourth question titled ‘how we use our land’, ‘return land to indigenous people’ scored third place (Kann et al. 2019). Reece Jones provides a framework for understanding that the ‘uneven geography of climate change’ (Jones 2017, 146) means that those forced to leave their homes due to climate change often come from countries that were colonised and where settlers have ran resource extraction schemes. Nonetheless, Indigenous rights and approaches to land might equally offer a more dialectic take on Heidegger’s connection between care, dwelling and belonging: in recognising that humans are not at the centre of an ecological chain, optimum dwelling looks perhaps more like caring for surroundings that, in turn, care for humans.
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Grøn, H. (2023). Ontologies of Belonging: Philosophical, Historical and Narratological Considerations. In: Asylum and Belonging through Collective Playwriting. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24808-5_2
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