Permacrises: Refugee Experience and Commonality-Building Practices in Omar El Akkad’s Narratives

Abstract

Abstract This paper analyses American War (2017) and What Strange Paradise (2021), the two novels published as of to date by the Canadian, US-based writer Omar El Akkad, in parallel to one of his short stories, “Riverbed” (2019). The three narratives are ingrained in an ambience of continuous instability to construct their realities of durable crisis: in a context of global climate emergency, they all inscribe an archaeological counter-memory against the erasure of refugee communities. El Akkad’s fictions also pay heed to the process of othering constructed amidst ongoing refugee crises to eventually re-member the subjectivity of those excluded by the discourse of nation-state belonging, in an automatic impulse against any threats that may bring a crisis to its required homogeneity. First, their multiple, intersecting crises disclose the precariousness of hegemonic identities in a social and environmentally degraded world, and, second, from the juncture of commonality-building practices and multiple eco-social intricacies, they present a global panorama in which the corroded bases of citizenship, political participation, and legal visibility announce a wider crisis of democratic endorsements.