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Disorienting empathy : reimagining the global border regime through Mohsin Hamid's Exit West
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Bellin, Stefano (2022) Disorienting empathy : reimagining the global border regime through Mohsin Hamid's Exit West. Literature Compass, 19 (12). e12694. doi:10.1111/lic3.12694 ISSN 1741-4113.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12694
Abstract
This article explores how literature can sensitise us to our potential implication in the injustice and violence of the global border regime. The violence of borders today sustains a large economic and political system that “produces precarity and disposability, exposes migrants and refugees to harm and exploitation, and reinforces global inequalities”. While it manifests itself in direct events, policies, and actions, the violence produced by the global border regime is structural, widespread, and racially charged. Citizens of the global North are not precisely perpetrators of border violence, yet they bear a certain kind of political responsibility for the experiences of trauma, death, impoverishment, and discrimination that borders generate and institutionalise. Reading Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017), I investigate how we can recognise ourselves in the position of the ‘implicated subject’ (Michael Rothberg) through a process of what I call ‘disorienting empathy’. This form of expanded and self-aware perspective-taking elicits our concern for others, but simultaneously de-centres our self, leading us to reflect critically on our subject position and on our potential indirect involvement in systemic violence. By examining Exit West's literary strategies, I argue that empathy, non-appropriative identification, and disorientation can generate a self-reflexivity about our responsibility in relation to the global border regime. Drawing on affect theory, literary theory, migration studies, and critical race theory, the article highlights contemporary fiction's capacity to represent diasporic experiences and reimagine the freedom of movement in the twenty-first century.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||
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Subjects: | J Political Science > JC Political theory J Political Science > JV Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration |
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Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Boundaries, Border security -- Social aspects, Refugees -- Government policy, Geopolitics, Human territoriality -- Political aspects, Emigration and immigration, Emigration and immigration -- Government policy, Freedom of movement -- Social aspects, Freedom of movement -- Social aspects, Empathy | ||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Literature Compass | ||||||
Publisher: | Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd. | ||||||
ISSN: | 1741-4113 | ||||||
Official Date: | 3 December 2022 | ||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 19 | ||||||
Number: | 12 | ||||||
Number of Pages: | 14 | ||||||
Article Number: | e12694 | ||||||
DOI: | 10.1111/lic3.12694 | ||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 24 January 2023 | ||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 26 January 2023 | ||||||
RIOXX Funder/Project Grant: |
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