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Inter-area/Border Crossing
Organized Panel Session
For those forced to migrate, international laws governing refugee protection and resettlement seem opaque and bewildering to navigate. That’s because they were not meant to be navigated—at least not by refugees. Today’s refugee regime—the global infrastructure of laws and institutions that contour refugee flows—serves mostly a gatekeeping function, mitigating the social and economic costs of refugee crises for Global North nations and only marginally addressing refugees’ humanitarian needs. Yet dominant narratives about the refugee regime in the Global North are either narratives of salvation, centering the (mostly white) rescuers of (mostly brown) refugees, or narratives of encroachment by a threatening tide of refugee Others. Refugee-authored literary texts arise out of, and bear the impacts of, not only the traumas that precipitate refugeeness, but also the survival strategies refugees develop as they navigate legal dead ends and obfuscatory dominant narratives. This essay examines Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, which is set in multiple countries and takes a magical-realist approach as it follows a couple fleeing their war-stricken country. Hamid imagines a universe in which the refugee regime and its sprawling administrative operations simply disappear; refugees traverse magical doors and instantly land in faraway, ostensibly safer, countries. The novel radically centers refugee perspectives during a global moment in which forced migration and border policing are on the rise. As Hamid suggests, in such a moment, refugee survival requires an almost-magical reallocation of the world’s power, resources, and safety—one that current refugee infrastructures are designed to forestall.
Mai-Linh Hong
Bucknell University