Abbas Khider's Refugee Narrative Ohrfeige : A System-Critical Intervention in the Continuing Human Rights and Solidarity Crisis

Abstract

Abstract: This article investigates Abbas Khider's Ohrfeige as a system-critical intervention in the discourse of forced migration and the continuing human rights and solidarity crisis. It focuses on Khider's use of the grotesque to illustrate how, as refugee narrative, Ohrfeige is symptomatically situated within the constraints of a profit-driven world economic system which reduces literature, cultures, and people to commodities, while growing numbers of refugee populations are kept in inhospitable spaces of radicalized exclusion. The grotesque also serves Khider as a distancing technique to highlight the need to assume active responsibility beyond humanitarian compassion to confront the injustices of our time.