Despectacularizing Refugee Narratives: Borderscaping and the Pathologies of In/Visibility in The Lightless Sky

This research explores the role that Gulwali Passarlay's memoir, The Lightless Sky: My Journey to Safety as a Child Refugee, plays in the broader refugee discourse of the West. Through a framework comprising Chiara Brambilla's take on “despectacularization” of the Mediterranean, Marieke Borren's rendering of Arendtian concept of “pathologies of invisibility,” and journalistic critiques on migration storytelling, this study interrogates whether Passarlay's narrative resists or reinforces dominant Western narratives. While the memoir offers a harrowing, first-person account of forced displacement that disrupts the media's border spectacle, it is simultaneously at risk of being used by host-state narratives that fetishize refugee success to project Western benevolence. This research contributes to the refugee scholarship by assessing the potential of despectacularized refugee narratives to reclaim political agency and question dominant ideologies of border regimes.