Abstract
This paper examines Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), which imagines in its form and content how the refugees transform the new spaces through their embodied presence, sociality, and interconnectivity. Literary works on refugee experiences and migration provide a distinct lens that helps ascertain the transcultural and transnational forces at work. Novels, like Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, create an alternative imaginary depicting the transformative potentials of transnational and transcultural movements. The novel’s depiction of refugee crises addresses the shifting perspectives regarding migration, reconfiguring the contour of belonging for the dispossessed. The novelistic account of the refugee movement, especially the search for a home by the refugees in Exit West, destabilizes the normative narrative prevalent on refugees, and in doing so, the novel rewrites the refugee narrative. I argue that Hamid’s novel presents refugees and migrants as embodied individuals whose mobility across porous borders defines humanity anew. The experience of traversing borders allows for an embodied existence that can remedy the inherently flawed notion of liberalism and neoliberalism regarding what defines a modern individual. In arguing this, I build on Elizabeth S. Anker’s observation on how some literary works produce an embodied account of humanity in fashioning a response to the decorporealized and abstract understanding of liberal subjecthood.
Presenters
Nadia HasanSenior Lecturer, Department of English, East West University Bangladesh, Bangladesh
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Embodiment, Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Decorporealized, Refugees
