Becoming Somali Bantus
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Published:February 2016
This chapter focuses on refugee agency to explore how refugees find and create spaces for action, collaborate with activists to elude and challenge structures of control, and articulate an alternative politics of identity and self-determination beyond their identity as exemplars of “bare life.” The chapter recounts the process of ethnogenesis through which Somali Bantu refugees in Dadaab consolidated an identity that would gain traction, while lobbying for resettlement in countries they selected, cultivating support from UNHCR staff, intervening in refugee verification procedures, taking on new family configurations, and accepting as their own generalized stories of suffering. Because the refugee resettlement process demands a particular identity, refugees create identity doubles through the resettlement process.