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This paper explores the dynamics and positionality between refugees and citizens, and ‘the space’ between refugees and citizens through two novel texts. Based on Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben's concepts of nation, refugee, and human rights, the paper will discuss Ele Fountain's Refugee87(2018) and Pyo Myeong-hee's Refugee in a Day(2018) which were published in the UK and Korea respectively. The two novel texts show that even citizens living normally within their countries of origin can become a ‘Homo Sacer’ and a ‘human species in its natural state’ at any moment. The fact that an ordinary citizen is suddenly reduced to a bare life(Homo Sacer) and then a refugee suggests that the boundary among a citizen, a bare life, and a refugee can be moveable and their positionalities are not fixed. The fluidity of citizens and refugees’ positionalities raises doubts about the operating principles that constitute the foundation of the modern nation-state. It can be said that the existence of refugees serves to endanger the originally fictitious national sovereignty.
Eundeog Hwang (Sat,) studied this question.