Book Section
In recent years, autobiographical narratives by transgender migrants and refugees from Africa have emerged, such as Farah Abdi’s Never Arrive, Neo Sandja’s Right Mind, Wrong Body, and Rizi Xavier Timane’s An Unspoken Compromise. This chapter examines these texts’ geographical focus and the resurgence of the ‘wrong body’ trope, considering what the transgender asylum narrative offers to the ‘trans travel narrative’. A key difference is the lack of a safe return — what I term the ‘unsafe return’.
Part of Breaking and Making Models Containing:
Introduction / Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Marietta Kesting, Claudia Peppel
Models as Media of Worlding in Sadie Benning and Fernand Deligny / Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
Abstraction as Strategy for Worldmaking: Generalization in Freud’s Rat Man / Julia Sánchez-Dorado
From Climate Model to Climate Fiction: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future as Operative Literature / Ross Shields
The Slime Mould’s Many Bodies, or Modelling Networks with Physarum polycephalum: Fanon with Lévi-Strauss / Maria Dębińska
Persistence: Model Asylum Narratives and a Recognizable ‘Transgenderness’
The Statistical Cloud of Race: Lancelot Hogben’s Anti-Eugenics between Populations and Organisms / Ben Woodard
Crises in Modelling: Articulations of the Romanian Labour Market in the Long 1990s / Alina-Sandra Cucu
Models, Markets, and Artificial Intelligence: A Brief History of our Speculative Present / Orit Halpern
Large Language Models, Parrots, and Children: Modelling Speech, Text, and Learning Processes / Marietta Kesting
Modelling Institutions, Instituting Models: The Juridification of Politics and the Performative Power of Naming / Natascia Tosel
Aesthetic Modelling at the Limit of the Human Montage: Vignettes of Homes and Homing / Marta Aleksandrowicz
The Exophonic Lyric: A Poetics / Mark Anthony Cayanan
Towards a Genealogy of Moffie: Troubling the Binary Model of Understanding either Homosexuality or Homophobia as Un-African / Ruth Ramsden-Karelse
Title
Persistence
Subtitle
Model Asylum Narratives and a Recognizable ‘Transgenderness’
Author(s)
B Camminga
Identifier
Description
In recent years, autobiographical narratives by transgender migrants and refugees from Africa have emerged, such as Farah Abdi’s Never Arrive, Neo Sandja’s Right Mind, Wrong Body, and Rizi Xavier Timane’s An Unspoken Compromise. This chapter examines these texts’ geographical focus and the resurgence of the ‘wrong body’ trope, considering what the transgender asylum narrative offers to the ‘trans travel narrative’. A key difference is the lack of a safe return — what I term the ‘unsafe return’.
Is Part Of
Place
Berlin
Publisher
ICI Berlin Press
Date
20 May 2025
Subject
transgender refugee
trans travel narrative
trans autobiography
wrong body narrative
transgender Africa
Rights
© by the author(s)
Except for images or otherwise noted, this publication is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Language
en-GB
page start
133
page end
154
Source
Breaking and Making Models, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Marietta Kesting, and Claudia Peppel, Cultural Inquiry, 33 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 133–54
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Publication scheduled for 20 May 2025