A FORMER professor living in Prestonpans has released his first book in more than 20 years in an attempt to challenge the demonisation of refugees and migrants.

Roger Bromley, of Prestongrange Road, is a retired Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies and visiting professor in the department of English and creative writing.

He moved to Prestonpans with his wife Anita five years ago to be closer to their daughter Catherine, who lives in Edinburgh.

The seasoned academic is the author of Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions (2000) and several other books and scholarly articles.

His new book, Narratives of Forced Mobility and Displacement in Contemporary Literature and Culture, was published with Palgrave Macmillan in June 2021.

Roger told the Courier: “In a nutshell, this book is an attempt to give visibility and voice to those whose lives, as far as the Western world is concerned, do not matter.

“This ties it in with opposition to certain statues linked to slavery, the Black Lives Matter movement and student struggles to de-colonise the university curriculum.

“This book is important to me because I volunteered for many years at the refugee centre in Nottingham and listened to many heart-breaking but also courageous stories which are rarely heard.

“This led me, about six years ago at the time of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe, to wonder why it was that when two-thirds of the world’s refugees never reach the shores of Europe, there is so much hostility in the mainstream media representations and in much of the population in general to people fleeing from violence, wars, persecution and environmental devastation.

“Why is there so much indifference to women, children and men dying in tens of thousands – 40,000 since 1990 – attempting to cross the Mediterranean or African deserts? Why did we not grieve or mourn for them?

“The book arose from these questions and an attempt to open new dialogues by questioning anti-refugee rhetoric.”

Roger began teaching at a range of English universities in 1966 following a year of teaching and studying in America.

The Prestonpans Community Council member worked as a visiting professor at Lancaster University for five years following his 2010 retirement.

The avid volunteer serves on various Preston Seton Gosford sub-committees, including the heritage sub-committee which produced the Salt of the Earth project and the children and young people’s sub-committee.

He will serve as a community council representative for the area partnership in September and spent time as the co-ordinator of the community council sub-group which planned to take over Prestonpans Town Hall.

The author, who has volunteered ay the Pennypit Lunch Club for local children, enjoys playing bowls at Prestongrange Bowling Club in his spare time.

Roger said that the dehumanisation of refugees led him to study the roots of European colonialism, “which started out from the assumption that the European man was the embodiment of the human and that all non-Europeans were sub-human, of no value and did not count”.

He added: “One of the tasks of the book is to analyse this ongoing coloniality and challenge it.”

An excerpt from the blurb reads: “Each chapter features work, or works, by refugees, and of particular importance is the presentation of cultural forms which are seen as interventions of agency and solidarity which combine creativity, activism and resistance.”

Roger added: “I would not presume to tell people what to think but, in a world where 84 million people are displaced and 26 million are refugees, I hope that the book will have an educational function in at the very least asking people to consider why it is a lot harder to be granted asylum than even five years ago and that twice as many people are displaced as there were 10 years ago.”

The book can be bought at fiveleavesbookshop.co.uk/product/narratives-of-forced-mobility-and-displacement-in-contemporary-literature-and-culture