Nine Fragments on The Art of Reading Asylum Documents

Abstract

The blatant contradiction in the continuing claims from formally recognized democracies of guaranteeing human rights while at the same time radically undermining the right to asylum, puts us into certain difficulties when working with the growing contemporary archive of documentation of asylum processes. How, in the reading of and writing about such processes, do we avoid the pitfalls of reproducing the dehumanization these documents attest to and in claims of speaking for those denied a place from which to speak? Through nine fragments, this text proposes a tentative method, informed by fiction and poetry, for the reading of asylum documents as part of an endeavor to resist the dehumanization at work in public discourse as well as asylum inquiry documents.

Keywords

• asylum process
• dehumanisation
• document
• indifference
• reading