“We are all migrants through time”: History and geography in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

ABSTRACT

Exit West reflects a progressive shift in Pakistani anglophone literature from the familiar framework of postcolonial writing back to writing beyond the 9/11 era. Set in a post-Brexit–Trump world, this speculative fiction seeks to democratize the future by re-imagining the relationship between history and geography, aligned with the dimensions of time and space. In Hamid’s view, the present wish of humanity to go back towards past greatness poses a grave danger to the imagining of a progressive future. His novel therefore presents a radical future of global migration imagined through the magical portals that allow instant access to destinations around the world, challenging border divisions. This article argues that this turn towards speculative postcolonial fiction opens literary doors into cognitive spaces of contestation as well as meaningful dialogues in a post-post-9/11 world of global insecurity and anti-immigration sentiments that have contributed to far reaching events like Brexit.

KEYWORDS:

• Mohsin Hamid
• Exit West
• postcolonial
• future
• Brexit
• migration

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Shazia Sadaf

Shazia Sadaf teaches human rights and social justice at the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Her research interest lies in the intersectional areas of War on Terror studies, human rights discourse, and post-9/11 anglophone literature. Her other articles have been published in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, South Asian History and Culture, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, and the European Journal of English Studies, as well as chapters in the Routledge Companion to Pakistani Anglophone Writing and Violence in South Asia