VOLUME 11 | ISSUE 1 | 2026
Leenu Sugathan, "The Refugee Counter-Archive: Feminist Refugee Epistemology and Human Rights Aesthetics in Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do"
Thi Bui’s graphic memoir The Best We Could Do (2018) intervenes in dominant visual and narrative regimes of refugee representation by constructing a refugee counter-archive—a feminist and affective practice of memory-making that reclaims narrative sovereignty from state, colonial, and humanitarian discourses. Drawing on feminist refugee epistemology (FRE) and developing the concept of human rights aesthetics (HRA), this article argues that Bui re-frames refugee subjectivity not through trauma, gratitude, or spectacle, but through agency, care, and everyday relational life. FRE, as theorized by the Critical Refugee Studies Collective, centers intimate modes of witnessing that foreground affect, domestic labor, and the textures of the everyday, while resisting masculinist and salvationist visualities. HRA, as articulated here, extends these commitments by identifying the visual and narrative strategies—such as non-spectacular framing, nonlinear temporality, tonal restraint, and symbolic motifs—through which Bui asserts the refugee’s capacity to witness, act, and claim rights.
Through close readings of key visual sequences—particularly those involving archival ephemera (ID photos, document folders, family photographs) and gestures of care that sustain life in displacement—the article examines how The Best We Could Do transforms the graphic memoir into a site of refugee knowledge production and rights-claiming. The memoir’s culminating concept of the “refugee reflex” encapsulates an embodied historical consciousness inherited across generations: a mode of vigilance and care that reconfigures displacement as ethical and relational rather than merely traumatic. By re-inscribing refugee life within an aesthetic of human rights grounded in the everyday, Bui envisions a futurity shaped not by victimhood or assimilation, but by memory, dignity, and the right to imagine otherwise.
Keywords: feminist refugee epistemology, human rights aesthetics, graphic memoir, refugee subjectivity, narrative sovereignty
Interviews
Eva Ulrike Pirker and Deniz Gündoğan İbrişim, "'A Constellation of Lives”: A Conversation with Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor"
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (b. 1968) is one of Kenya’s most accomplished contemporary authors, known for her intricate prose, lyrical sensibility, and profound engagement with memory, place, and belonging. Her body of work includes short fiction, essays, and two novels—Dust (2013) and The Dragonfly Sea (2019)—and spirals around the question of how individual and collective identities are transformed by history, geography and ecological entanglements. Difficult memories and (collective) amnesia permeate her oeuvre, which can be described as contributing to a larger mnemonic project. Time and again, this project situates itself at the crossroads of culture and environment, interweaving myth, politics, and the intimate textures of daily life. Throughout Owuor’s texts, non-human agents recur, functioning as witnesses, archives and spaces of shelter. This conversation was inspired by explorations of the presence of trees in Owuor’s writing, her fiction and literary journalism.
Keywords: Kenyan literature and culture, cultural memory, cultural hegemony, humanities education, resistance movements
