Refugee fiction as world-literature: Rethinking registration in the contemporary refugee novel

ABSTRACT

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees #IBelong campaign reinforces the importance of national belonging in crisis resolution. However, both the “refugee crisis” and world-literature complicate this classification of belonging. Whilst research into refugee fiction is abundant, readings of refugee fiction as world-literature are sparse. This paper re-examines the impact of the “refugee crisis” on classifications of belonging, arguing that a reading of refugee fiction through the Warwick Research Collective’s definition of world-literature enables an understanding of the systems and forces underlying the crisis. Synthesizing the work of the Warwick Research Collective, Hannah Arendt, and Judith Butler, it explores contemporary social (rather than national) belonging in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, enabling a critique of the United Nations-led assignment of rights in the contemporary world. Through reading registration in refugee fiction, we can re-examine literature’s role in crisis, critiquing contemporary responses to the “refugee crisis”, and contributing alternative approaches based on collective belonging.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee fiction
• world-literature
• Warwick Research Collective
• belonging
• crisis
• Exit West

Introduction: #IBelong and refugee fiction

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) #IBelong campaign “aims to end statelessness in ten years” (UNHCR n.d.-a). According to the UN (United Nations), to “belong” relates to the condition of having a nationality, an identity assigned through being a recognized member of a sovereign nation state (Wallerstein 2004, 42). To belong in the contemporary world is thus defined by the written assignment of nationhood through documentation and legal categorization. It is through this categorization that we continue to understand the refugee in terms defined by the 1951 UNHCR “Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees” which defines a refugee as a person who,

owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted [ … ], is outside the country of his [sic] nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it. (UNHCR 1951, 14)

Yet the notion of nationality as a category for assigning belonging as defined through hard borders is an assumption that both the contemporary “refugee crisis”¹ and world-literature complicate. The modern world, understood through the frame of both world-literature and the refugee crisis, is one in which individual and state subjectivities are in fact inextricably linked to a much broader world-system both of belonging and of crisis. Reading refugee fiction² as world-literature, and thus through the frame of violence on a world-systemic scale, this article proposes an examination of belonging not through state-assigned nationality, but beyond and past the boundaries of national identity. In doing so, I argue that this mode of enquiry is vital for exploring the potential for human rights access not as the “right to have rights” (Arendt (1996) 2017, 388) – that is, rights gained through access to statehood – but rather by virtue of belonging to a shared and systematically connected singular world. Vitally, in this alternative model of human rights, responsibility for the rights of others is extended from the narrow idea of those belonging to a certain state, to a broader definition of humanity across the world.

Scholarship on refugee fiction is abundant, with most work examining the ethics of representation of the refugee crisis and investigating how these representations reinforce harmful hierarchies through imperial and development discourses (Bakara 2020; Gallien 2018). However, the framing of refugee fiction through the specific contours of world-literary registration has yet to be examined. Like the theoretical grounding of world-literary approaches which depart from the previous examinations of national literatures, the refugee crisis disrupts ideas of nationality and national boundaries, particularly given the extent of the current crisis. From an international relations perspective, Alexander Betts (2009) has shown that “the concept of a ‘refugee’ exists as a manifestation of both the breakdown of the state-citizen and citizen-territory relationship upon which the sovereign state is premised” (44). Furthermore, from a postcolonial perspective, Ranabir Samaddar (2020) has shown that “the postcolonial impact has been mainly in the form of combining a nation state’s border and security strategy with old imperial-colonial strategy [sic] of maintaining expansive security lines and zones, keeping virtual borderlands, expanses of indeterminate zones” (154). Finally, Christopher Foster (2020) argues that the current refugee crisis was created and is maintained by neo-liberalism and neocolonialism (370). Foster shows how the actions taken by world powers such as the USA, “from racial capitalism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade, imperialism, to neoliberal globalization and now the monstrous resurgence of xenophobic nationalism [ … ] continue to devastate and destabilize the Global South” (350). Considering these arguments, this article suggests that it becomes vital to read refugee fiction not as an isolated genre or through national boundaries but rather through the lens of a world – or world-system – in crisis.

This article examines what happens when refugee fiction is read as world-literature, which is defined by the Warwick Research Collective (WReC 2015) as a “remaking of comparative literature after the multicultural debates and the disciplinary critique of Eurocentrism” (4; emphasis in original). The WReC’s work builds on key interventions in postcolonial studies, arguing for an analysis of literature not through a framework of nation-state thinking as proffered by critics like Aamir Mufti (2014, 319), but through and with the tensions examined in world-systems analysis, between a globalizing economic logic and a political system characterized by a hierarchically structured system of nation states (Wallerstein 2004, 16–18). In so doing, the WReC proposes a hyphenated “world-literature”, referencing the hyphenated “world-system” in order to “[pursue] the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined and uneven development” (2015, 6). In the WReC’s terms, then, a world-literary analysis reads literature produced in the last 200 years – from the “worlding of capital” (15; italics in original) through British and European colonialism to today – as “a literature that variously registers this combined unevenness in both its form and its content” (49). The single but “radically uneven world-system” is thus “both what world-literature indexes or is ‘about’ and what gives world-literature its distinguishing formal characteristics” (15). What happens, then, to our classification of “belonging” when we read refugee fiction as world-literature? What role does world-literature – understood as registering the modern world-system – play in recalibrating an understanding of that very world-system, and thus of the experience of belonging within it?

Defining world-literary registration

A clear definition of a “registration of the world-system” (WReC 2015, 20) is needed to answer these questions, given that the WReC take this to be the defining feature of world-literature, and thus of the framework through which this article analyzes refugee fiction. A reading of textual registration rather than textual representation involves reading the text as a form of cultural production which recognizes the functioning of culture as part of the structure of the capitalist world-system (Shapiro 2020; WReC 2015, 2016). In the case of refugee fiction, the notion of registration is also vital given its non-literary usage where if an individual is registered, they are recorded, usually through some form of official documentation. World-literature is thus understood as contributing to rather than simply reflecting the experience of the world-system by playing a part in the formation of cultural subjectivity. This is particularly clear when we understand the WReC’s definition through Stephen Shapiro’s (2020) later exploration of “the cultural fix” (92). Shapiro uses the notion of “relative fixed labor-power” to examine the role of literature as a form of cultural production which contributes to a cultural fix. “Relative fixed labor-power” is defined as “all that shapes class subjectivity [including] the composition of class relations and the social infrastructure of institutions and parainstitutions that make proletarian subordination and resistance possible” (96). Relative fixed labor-power, then “is the realm of the social, cultural, and political” (96; emphasis in original) and thus literature is a cultural form, contributing to a class subjectivity which enables both subordination and resistance. Since “fixed labor-power [ … ] is integrated within the production of value” (102), literature too is within the production of value, forming part of a “cultural fix” which works to “consolidate class interests within a formal and informal composition” (98) and thus contributes to and forms a part of capitalist systems of accumulation: a registration of these systems, as opposed to a representation. This article rests on an interpretation of literary registration as expressing the notion that literature does not simply represent the experience of the modern world-system. Instead, world-literature embodies the very dynamics of the world-system into both its form and its content.

In relation to literary registration as cultural production, in this article “culture” is defined as denoting those activities and ideologies which enable a particular understanding about oneself, defining how individuals form cultural subjectivities and particular understandings of themselves within the world, and with respect to those around them. This definition of culture suggests capitalism is not only the economic system in which people live but organizes how people see themselves, and aligns with the WReC’s conception that “modernity might be understood as the way in which capitalist social relations are ‘lived’ ” (2015, 12). In this article, I adopt Shapiro’s suggestion that “the appearance and absence of cultural productions belongs to a relational matrix that not only embeds culture within the total circuit of capital, but also makes it constitutive of historical transformation” (2020, 91). Building on this work, my focus lies in reading world-literature as an exploration of capitalism specifically through its organization of cultural subjectivity, seeking to understand the embedding of culture in capital itself through explorations within literature. Belonging therefore provides the ideal route into exploring these questions, since belonging is defined by the way that we understand ourselves with respect to others, enabling an examination of the cultural experience of the capitalist system simultaneously with its material functioning.

Exit West and the role of world-literary refugee fiction

Taking Mohsin Hamid’s (2017) Exit West as an example, this article examines how registration works in contemporary refugee fiction. Whilst there are obvious limitations in analyzing a single novel in discussion with broader themes such as “refugee fiction” and the “refugee crisis”, as a case study, an analysis of Exit West illuminates the structural issues at play in a literary examination of the crisis, which could be applied to other similar refugee fictions. Through the framework of Søren Frank’s (2008) understanding of “migration literature” (7), Exit West is explored as refugee fiction since it expresses concerns and subject matter relevant to the refugee experience. Through an exploration of the concept of belonging in refugee fiction, I argue that world-literary registration enables an understanding of the forces of the capitalist world-system within the literary text. This permits an understanding of literature’s cultural (re)production of subjectivity through its registration of the tensions between a world-systemic (singular) economic system and its (uneven) hierarchization through nation-state blocs, allowing an examination of the way these tensions create and maintain the refugee crisis. This in turn facilitates a critique of the UN’s #IBelong campaign, which attempts to solve the contemporary refugee crisis by reinstating the same system of national belonging which maintains it. Instead, this article proposes a system of universal responsibility and accountability for human rights.

Exit West and surveillance

Exit West tells the story of Saeed and Nadia, a couple who escape their war-torn city, travelling through a series of magical tunnels that transport them nearly instantaneously from one country to another. Nadia and Saeed become refugees, fleeing from one country to the next to reach safety. Set in a dystopian world, the text engages with several key issues surrounding the current refugee crisis, including uneven borders and mass surveillance.

In Exit West, Hamid registers a world-system organized by surveillance capitalism in order to classify people and reinstate national belonging, consequently writing whole populations out of belonging. Hannah Arendt ([1943] 2007) argues that

human beings as such have ceased to exist for quite a while; since society has discovered discrimination as the great social weapon by which one may kill men without any bloodshed; since passports or birth certificates, and sometimes even income tax receipts, are no longer formal papers but matters of social distinction. (273)

As early as 1943, Arendt highlighted how the surveillance of people through documentation had become a mode of social discrimination, and in the 74 years between Arendt’s writing and Hamid’s text, the sophistication and prevalence of surveillance methods have only grown. Both Susana Ferreira (2019, 97) and Yogita Goyal (2020), for example, note how the contemporary refugee is consistently subjected to a range of surveillance technologies, used both to detain and to exclude people. Hamid portrays this phenomenon in Saeed and Nadia’s city, describing how “as soon as they stepped outside, they could be seen by the lenses peering down on their city from the sky and from space, and by the eyes of militants, and of informers, who might be anyone, everyone” (2017, 88–89). Illustrating this further, we later hear that “those [who are] unable to prove their legal residence [are sent] to great holding camps” (134–135), thus highlighting the power of surveillance methods both to count citizens and, in the process, to exclude. Thus, a geographical divide is created between those with the correct documentation and those lacking it, those who belong and those who apparently do not. This appears entirely abstracted from the lives of people and yet renders whole populations “stateless” and lacking belonging, as defined by the UN’s idea of belonging through national identity (UNHCR n.d.-a). The experience of alienation between what is written on paper and the actuality of refugee personhood is a common theme in refugee literature. Texts such as Clemantine Wamariya’s (2018) The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Christy Lefteri’s (2019) The Beekeeper of Aleppo, and Matthieu Aikins’s (2022) The Naked Don’t Fear the Water highlight how hegemonic powers attempt to reproduce a mode of belonging which is inherently exclusionary, given its reliance on processes of othering.

Exit West and the malleability of borders

Along with surveillance methods, Hamid also explores how contemporary Euro American protectionist policies reinstate capitalist modes of nation-state belonging as a way to distance crisis and make it an issue for “elsewhere”. These scenarios in Exit West show the use of (frequently hostile) nationalist sentiment to enable protectionist economic policy, emphasizing the entanglement of enforced modes of belonging and economic systems. Hamid’s description of “nativist extremists”, rioting to “reclaim Britain for Britain” (2017, 132), reflects discourse employed by the Leave campaign during the 2016 EU (European Union) referendum in the UK, including the desire to “take back control” over immigration policy (Gietel-Basten 2016, 673; Wellings 2018, 153). The reference to “rich countries [ … ] building walls and fences and strengthening their borders” (Hamid 2017, 71) refers to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to build a wall at the US border with Mexico since, according to Trump, the “border [was] being breached daily by criminals” (2015). Both ideologies represent a desire for control over national identity and thus over who belongs and who does not. Hamid’s text can therefore be situated amongst a host of contemporary migration literatures which are “preoccupied with the politics of the border [enacting] a process of worlding [ … ] through the irregular routes” (Kebsi 2023, 439) taken by illegal immigrants. These policies are referred to directly throughout Exit West, but also presented indirectly through the use of magical doors which allow people to rapidly move across the world. Hamid describes how “the doors to richer destinations, were heavily guarded, but the doors in, the doors from poorer places, were mostly left unsecured [ … ] because there were simply too many doors from too many poorer places to guard them all” (2017, 101). Thus, whilst the doors enable rapid travel, they are simultaneously unequal in this accessibility. The few doors allowing access to wealthier countries impose strict barriers, whilst those imagined in the Global South appear open to all. Whilst Shazia Sadaf (2020) argues that “the doors [in the text] eliminate any discrimination between those who have access and those who do not” (641), I suggest that Hamid’s use of these doors is much more nuanced. Hamid’s registration of the protectionist policies implemented by core countries³ serves to highlight the futility of these very policies. His use of the magical doors thus highlights that those core countries can provide greater protection against infiltrations of their “pure” national identities. However, the existence of this system of doors maintains a connection to the rest of the world. As such, the strict barriers imposed by those “richer destinations” highlight the combined yet uneven nature of the world-system, with the doors linking countries across the world into a single system, whilst highlighting the uneven nature of that system.

Hamid further emphasizes the impossibility of national belonging in a contemporary globalized economy defined by financialization, through his registration of the specifically (semi-)peripheral experience of time-space compression in the modern world-system (Harvey 1989, 327; WReC 2015, 51). This notion, as explored by David Harvey (1989) and built upon by the WReC, defines the experience of modern capitalism’s collapsing of space in time through globalizing forces which create an experience of the modern world as “shrinking”. The contemporary refugee crisis enables a stark critique of this time-space compression through accumulation, given the openness of countries to commodity exports and imports, and the opposing dangers faced by refugees trying to cross borders to access safety. According to Harvey, “the crisis of overaccumulation that began in the late 1960s” has created a “strong aesthetic [movement]” because of “an overwhelming sense of time-space compression” (1989, 327). The WReC also highlights the importance of this concept in stating that “we must attend to [world-literature’s] modes of spatio-temporal compression” (2015, 17), including literature’s registration of this concept through narrative and form. Hamid registers this aesthetic in Exit West by using the doors through which the characters move vast distances in almost no time, such that “the whole planet was on the move” (2017, 167). The only real detail about the appearance of the doors is their opacity and blackness, “a rectangle of complete darkness – the heart of darkness” (6). Critics have considered the reference to Joseph Conrad’s ([1902] 1994) Heart of Darkness here, constructing arguments surrounding the inversion of colonial racism or simply making the reference without explanation (Al-Nakib 2020, 236; Karam 2020, 224; Lagji 2019, 194; Perfect 2019, 312). I argue instead that this allusion reflects the worlding of the capitalist system, the beginnings of the forced interferences of the capitalist system on a world scale (WReC 2015, 15). The rapid movement of people through the doors collapses spatial distinctions and alters temporal experience, allowing the refugees to move in a way which more closely resembles the financialization of the world economy in the neo-liberal era than it does the movement of people. Through this imagery, then, Hamid rather scathingly critiques the malleability of borders for economic purposes compared to the restrictiveness of borders against human safety.

Reading Hamid’s text through the framework of world-literary belonging therefore emphasizes the futility of the nation state as a marker of official belonging and thus of rights, given the neo-liberal “constitution of a single system of capital and monetary exchange, operating in real time and tying together all financial markets” (Balibar 2004, 103). Defining belonging only in national terms becomes a simplification, given that in the actual functioning of the neo-liberal capitalist world-system, there is an inherent contradiction between the nation state as a bloc in a system of political hierarchization and the singularity of a world economic system which blurs national borders. In understanding capitalism as inherently cultural as well as economic in its organization, we must thus search for alternative modes of belonging outside the nation-state definition to enable an assignment of rights that also registers this contradiction of combined unevenness.

Exit West and belonging

Given the WReC’s cultural-materialist perspective, combined and uneven development can be read simultaneously in terms of the combined and uneven economic development across the world, but also in terms of the singular but radically different subjectivities of individuals within that world-system. This approach to world-literature poses nation-state boundaries as an analytical model in tension with an economic logic that is tendentially globalizing, thus complicating state boundaries as a mode of defining belonging. As such, new understandings of our social positioning in the world must be formed. This then serves as a reminder of the central tenet of my understanding of world-literary registration. Following Shapiro, I argue that the breakdown of the base-superstructure model signals a turn away from previous semiotic thinking to instead understand the “complex questions of social (or collective) capital” (2020, 92). In line with the WReC’s own analysis, these “complex questions” are best understood through the framework of combined and uneven development, producing singular but radically different experiences of “social capital”. This is particularly evident in the WReC’s own suggestion that “we use the term ‘registration’ (rather than representation) to discuss the [particularly complex] relation between literary form and social reality” (2016, 544). A world-literary approach to refugee fiction thus acknowledges the pressures and structures which intervene in the internal form of the text itself, contributing to alternative subjectivities of refugees and their access to rights.

World-literary registration enables this re-subjectification by providing an antithesis to the surveillance used to cast people as stateless, instead writing populations back into an alternative form of belonging. Hamid presents the refugee camps in which Nadia and Saeed are forced to stay as micro-societies, highlighting a fluid belonging in which anybody is welcome. Hamid tells how, in the face of threats from the police, the refugees in “the house were terrified [and so] a sort of camaraderie evolved [ … as] here they were penned together, and being penned in made them into a grouping, a group [ … ] to which anyone might belong, joining or leaving as they saw fit” (2017, 124, 109). Giorgio Agamben (1995) refers to refugees living a “bare life” in camps stripped of all political life and social codes (116). Hamid’s registration of the refugee situation here, however, stands in stark contrast to Agamben’s definition; the camp is not a place stripped of all political life but in fact a politically charged place, involving the rewriting of societal codes, not their complete removal. The people occupying the house bond over a mutual need to maintain some form of shelter and security. To read this through the nexus of representation vastly undermines the horrific battle that refugees face, given the apparent ease of belonging presented by Hamid. Instead, as a registration of the modern world-system, and thus a response to its surveillance rather than a narration of its experience, Hamid highlights the rewriting of societal codes, as societal belonging is formed through need, not through national categorizations.

This is further supported in Hamid’s use of the formation of community in the refugee camps to break down the construction of the world through binary oppositions such as “natives” and “foreigners”, usually enabled by the nation-state conception. Through Étienne Balibar (2004, 8–9) and Lisa Malkki’s (1995) analyses, we can see that the very condition of the refugee stems from the concept of belonging (or not belonging) created by the modern sovereign nation state and its organization of people; a system preserved through policies such as Brexit and Donald Trump’s wall. In contrast, Hamid presents an alternative way of belonging, independent of these capitalist definitions or signs, and instead defined by the social experience of belonging as opposed to its legal definitions. In the Greek camp where Nadia and Saeed stay for a while, “everyone was foreign, and so, in a sense, no one was” (Hamid 2017, 100). The concept of being foreign is brought into question here. Linguistically, to be foreign is dependent upon another person being native. Therefore, Hamid here draws attention to the unity of opposites on which national identity relies. The novel links the camp in Greece with the one Nadia and Saeed eventually reach in Marin after difficulties in settling force them to move again later in the text. Again, the presentation of the camp in Marin explores the concept of the native, suggesting that “nativeness [is] a relative matter, and many others considered themselves native to this country [ … ] their existence here did not owe anything to a physical migration that had occurred in their lifetimes” (Hamid 2017, 196). Hamid thus complicates both the concept of foreignness and that of nativeness since they cannot stand alone but rely on one another. With these signs disassembled, the camp becomes a place of shared belonging, denying exclusion by broadening foreignness.

Judith Butler (2004) breaks down the concepts of foreignness and nativeness further, arguing that, whilst legal descriptions “establish our legitimacy within a legal framework ensconced in liberal versions of human ontology, [they] do not do justice to [emotions] which tear us from ourselves, bind us to others [ … and] implicate us in lives that are not our own” (24–25). People living in refugee camps are connected in a way that goes beyond signifying definitions and is instead predicated on a shared experience of violence and human emotion, a concept which for Butler, “despite our differences in location and history [enables us] to appeal to a ‘we’” (20), a shared belonging. Similarly, Hamid’s registration intervenes with our understanding of the world and our position within it, by asking us to consider how the binary concepts of native and foreign rely on one another and thus lose meaning when one breaks down. In losing the meaning of opposite ideas, belonging becomes only a cultural experience of the world-system that is no longer representable. This version of belonging is defined by shared (“combined”) emotion and experience, even as it is experienced differently (“unevenly”) at the individual level (WReC 2015, 15).

Through an exploration of the capitalist world-system as predicated upon migration, Hamid further dismantles these binaries and thus writes refugees into an alternative form of belonging. Mushtaq Bilal (2020) argues that Hamid “has consciously deployed the form of the novel to narrate the Global North–South divide because he does not describe the movement and displacement of characters in ‘national’ terms but as a movement from the Global South to the Global North” (419). Bilal suggests that Hamid uses the framework of migration to reject national belonging and to instead “[narrate] the world through an exploration and enactment of the Global North–South divide” (2020, 419; emphasis in original). I build on Bilal’s suggestion, recognizing the rejection of the nation state in the text’s framework of migration, but explore this through the historicized nexus of the capitalist world-system, rather than through the further binary of the north–south divide. Hamid speaks of a “third layer of nativeness [ … ] composed of those who others thought directly descended [ … ] from the human beings who had been brought over from Africa” as enslaved people (2017, 196–197). This statement complicates “nativeness” by aligning the forced movement of people during the transatlantic slave trade with the forced movement of people in the capitalist system which similarly relies on them as commodities for profits. It undermines Goyal’s argument that Hamid presents human displacement as “outside of history or politics” (2020, 255), since the refugee condition is placed within the context of past and present violence. In this way, Hamid shows the hypocrisy of a system built on the forced movement of people for the purposes of capital accumulation, yet simultaneously is closed to people moving to escape violence. The refugee camp is therefore not only a place of bodies and humanitarian care but, in fact, enables collective identity and the creation of a “particular political subjectivity” through historicization (Malkki 1996, 378). Whilst the vast experiences of refugees must not be homogenized, nor should the refugee experience be merged with that of transatlantic slavery, a continuum of violent, forced movement of people spatially and temporally across the capitalist world-system can be seen. Belonging enabled through these shared yet different experiences of violence is shown to be vastly more stable than that enabled through nationality. Community in the text is thus enabled through the seemingly inevitable experience of violence, at once both singular and impossibly varied.

Hamid further expands on the concept of belonging through a system of combined yet uneven violence in his registration of the contemporary refugee crisis as a world issue rather than one which can be enclosed in the boundaries of individual nation states. Hamid achieves this through the allegorical nature of his novel, avoiding a focus on any one refugee population and instead highlighting the combined and uneven nature of crisis itself in the modern world-system. Saeed and Nadia’s home city is never named throughout the text, instead simply described at the beginning as “a city swollen by refugees but [ … ] not yet openly at war” (Hamid 2017, 1). The image suggests an injury which needs fixing; the violent image of refugees as a cause of destruction which must be fixed (Perfect 2019, 190). Hamid thus uses this image to draw attention to views of the refugee crisis as something that needs to be fixed by returning to a pre-crisis “normal” within the bounds of the modern world-system, an idea which Arendt strongly opposes. Arendt ([1943] 2007, 274) argues that the refugee condition is in fact an inherent part of the modern world-system, showing how the system literally destroys its own notion of national belonging. By speaking in general terms rather than exploring one refugee population’s experiences, Hamid highlights the refugee crisis as a wider issue, one which cannot be fixed or healed, but which is instead inherent to the capitalist world-system.

Hamid’s appropriation of these dominant views of the refugee condition is contrasted by his worlding of the crisis, through his refusal to name his protagonists’ city. In doing so, Hamid presents this state as an inherent part of the world in its organization through the capitalist world-system. This is made evident through the drastically increasing prominence of this condition in the contemporary world, with 103 million forcibly displaced people worldwide by mid-2022 (UNHCR n.d.-b). It is further supported by the idea of Saeed and Nadia’s city being “not yet openly at war”, highlighting the precarity of many cities in the contemporary world (Hamid 2017, 1). Hamid himself stated in an interview that he chose not to name the city to avoid referring to specific aspects of the refugee crisis, so that the reader could imagine the city as their own city or that of their family (Hamid 2018, n.p.), reinforcing the idea of the precarity of the contemporary condition. As Michael Perfect (2019) suggests, Exit West “poignantly shows that any one of us could become a refugee” (199).

It is vital to acknowledge the potentially problematic nature of generalizing statements such as these, without recognizing the uneven nature of the contemporary condition. I want to suggest, however, that a more subtle understanding of the text in fact highlights the increasingly prominent nature of the refugee condition as well as the reliance on this forced condition for some, to maintain what many others perceive to be daily normality. In this way, the text thus warns specifically against the Euro American approach to the crisis which relies on hardening borders to distance this crisis. Hamid actively lessens proximity to violence for those within core areas of the world-system by highlighting the reliance of that world-system on this very violence, implicating, to varying extents, the entire world in accountability for the crisis. Both Arendt and Butler explore this, suggesting that being in a state of vulnerability with the potential for danger is the generalized human condition, although of course drastically uneven in its manifestation: Arendt suggests that the refugee who internalizes their identity rather than attempting to assimilate is “the vanguard of their peoples” ([1943] 2007, 274), whilst Butler argues that “each of us is constituted politically in part by the social vulnerability of our bodies” (2004, 20). Neither writer ignores the horrors of the refugee condition and thus its unimaginability to an outsider. However, they show the state of crisis itself as global. The violent modern world-system is one in which the refugee condition is no longer a state of exception but in fact an inevitability. Through this concept of our connection to others through a shared bodily vulnerability, Hamid rewrites a world-belonging, contrasting dominant understandings of exclusionary nation-state belonging with a belonging developed through the global inevitability of violence. Belonging in the text becomes a codification of the tensions between globalizing and hierarchizing forces, rather than neat separation into blocs.

The text’s structure replicates this mode of world-belonging as it is organized around the story of the protagonists, Nadia and Saeed, but is interrupted periodically by vignettes of unnamed characters, registering the mediation of belonging through the experience of others. One such interruption featuring a “young man” begins “in the Tokyo district of Shinjuku where midnight had already come and gone, and so, technically, the next day had already commenced” (Hamid 2017, 25–26). The minor, unnamed character of the vignette is linked to Saeed and Nadia temporally even as they experience this time differently as different days. In this way, Hamid presents time as “combined and uneven” in itself; one single temporal category experienced differently by people across the world. A later vignette tells of “a young woman” in Vienna, a city which “had witnessed massacres in the streets, the militants shooting unarmed people then disappearing” (104). The graphic violence, carried out by the same militants creating mass violence in Saeed and Nadia’s own city, connects the two cities through their mutual experience of violence. Structurally, these tenuous connections to minor unnamed characters interrupt the flow of the main protagonists’ story, mediating their process of belonging through that of others and thus allowing them to “belong” only in the context of the rest of the world. This mediation occurs through combined yet uneven experiences of temporality and violence. Corina Selejan (2019) reads the structure of the novel, with its frequent interruptions, as fragmented, representing the “fractured world of the present as well as the near future” (108). However, reading this aspect of the text through the framework of belonging, with the help of Arendt, I instead argue that it enables a sense of “world-belonging” as unified for exactly the reasons that Selejan cites as fracturing: the shared experience of violence. Arendt argued that, since European identity relies on continually outlawing other populations, for those refugee populations who embrace this identity, “history is no longer a closed book for them” ([1943] 2007, 274). We can further understand this through Michael Niblett’s (2012) argument that “on the other side of the international division of labor [the capitalist world-system] is more immediate and pressing” (20).

Conclusion: Human rights outside national belonging

Refugee literature as world-literature reconditions our understanding of the world by altering our temporal conceptualization of violence, bringing the future to the present through a lessening proximity to future violence. Hamid thus invites us to historicize the modern world-system but also to go further, understanding socio-economic violence as a core mechanism of the system. For a reader from the core areas of the world-system, the state of belonging that was once one of national safety is now destabilized as it is mediated by the precarious belonging of people from across the world, altering spatial and temporal boundaries. As such, Euro American tendencies towards distancing humanitarian crises and responsibility for human rights through increasingly hard borders are rejected here. The anonymity which Hamid maintains between the vignettes’ characters and the protagonists highlights how characters’ experiences are combined and thus incidental to one another, even as they are entirely uneven. As such, Hamid rewrites refugees into belonging by showing how proximity to violence is an essential part of the modern world-system, enabling a social belonging that transcends spatial and temporal borders. The singularity of the modern world-system means that precarity is a universal and inescapable condition, even as its manifestation and lived experience in each instance remains unique and, for some, will never even come into existence.

Both world-literature and the refugee crisis are simultaneously a creation of the modern world-system and disruptive of perceived national definitions of the system. By reading refugee fiction as world-literature, these texts become cultural products, contributing to cultural subjectivity. Reading Hamid’s text through a world-literary approach, we can understand capitalist cultural subjectivity as enabled through shared proximity to violence. How does that change our understanding of refugee fiction? By altering our viewpoint of what constitutes belonging, refugee fiction writes refugees back into an alternative form of belonging based on shared, yet uneven, proximity to violence. This exploration of belonging enables a further critique of the UN’s #IBelong campaign around the contemporary refugee crisis. In their determination to end statelessness by 2024, the UN’s campaign reinstates national belonging as the only accepted mode of belonging and thus, the only way to access human rights (UNHCR n.d.-a). However, national belonging is in fact becoming increasingly difficult to achieve, and maintain, meaning that the UN’s campaign serves only to reproduce the crisis.

If the refugee crisis inherently registers the contrasting pressures of a globalizing economic system and a political hierarchy of nation states in the modern world, then the crisis demands a rethinking of the assignment of rights through national belonging, as Balibar suggested in his call for an international right of hospitality “to limit the arbitrariness of States by confronting them with legitimate and internationally recognized counter-powers” (2018, n.p.). The issues explored in this article are thus vital not only for world-literary and refugee studies, but for how we understand human rights themselves, particularly when viewed through the frame of Arendt’s “right to have rights” ((1996) 2017, 388). Arendt’s model highlights how the reproduction of the nation-state system also signals the reproduction of a system where those who do not hold a national identity (a national belonging) do not have access to even the most basic human rights, and those who do, hold little accountability for those “outside”. Despite claims surrounding “universal” or “inalienable” human rights, our current system of human rights is based within a particular cultural subjectivity which relies upon national belonging and where nation states regularly distance themselves from the preservation of the rights of others. Given the role of world-literature in altering what we understand our cultural subjectivity to be, we must question what role world-literature could play in proposing new frameworks of human rights, based around alternative understandings of cultural subjectivity in the contemporary world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council; Midlands4Cities.

Notes on contributors

Charlotte Spear

Charlotte Spear is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. Her thesis is titled “Locating the Human: World Literature and the Concept of Rights” and explores the role of literature in rethinking dominant human rights frameworks. She has published on the notion of the “state of emergency” in Modern Language Review and has publications upcoming on issues including postcolonial humanitarian intervention, extended temporalities of disaster and literary responses to sexual trauma.

Notes

1. I refer throughout this article to the “refugee crisis”, in order to attend to the article’s specific critique of the UN’s dealings with the crisis, whilst also acknowledging the ongoing debates around the problematics of the “refugee” designation (Anderson 2017; Hayden 2006; Lister 2013).

2. I refer to “refugee fiction” rather than migration literature to draw attention to the specific contours of the refugee crisis, and to highlight the emphasis on fictionality as opposed to memoir or the specific figure of the refugee author.

3. By “core countries”, I follow Immanuel Wallerstein’s definition in referring to those regions in the world-system that are characterized by the most profitable, predominantly monopolized as opposed to competitive production processes (Wallerstein 2004, 28).