The more-than-human refugee journey: Hassan Blasim’s short stories

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the representation of forced and clandestine migration in some of Hassan Blasim’s short stories within an interdisciplinary conceptual framework that brings together theories of biopolitics, ecocriticism, human rights discourse, heterotopia, and the aesthetics of “nightmare realism”. Blasim’s short stories offer new opportunities to address territoriality, life and truth at their limits in real and imagined sites where forest and border, human and non-human meet to suggest more-than-human futures for the paradoxical project of reclaiming human rights. By analysing Blasim’s unique representational techniques, through which he mediates material and discursive violence within a combined biopolitical-ecological framework, the article also investigates the potentials and limitations of a more ecologically attuned perspective on freedom of movement and community, based on the claims of the environment rather than the nation.

KEYWORDS:

• Hassan Blasim
• migration
• more-than-human
• biopolitics
• ecocriticism
• nightmare realism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Here I follow a recent scholarly trend to address “biopolitics” not only from the perspective of Foucault’s (1978) conceptualizations in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, but also taking into consideration his crucial remarks in his Lectures at Collège de France delivered in the 1970s (2010), as well as the work of Thomas Lemke (2011) and Lemm and Vatter’s (2014) edited volume on the topic.

2. For a reconsideration of the questions raised by Agamben from the perspective of Hannah Arendt’s foundational contributions to the field, see the articles by Patricia Owens (2009) and Etienne Balibar (2007).

3. In her article on Blasim’s “The Reality and the Record”, Nadia Atia (2017) notes that in the story, “ ‘the horror’ (translated from the Arabic الفزع, which might mean fear, dread, or fright, but also terror or a feeling of foreboding) cannot but evoke the final words of Joseph Conrad’s Kurtz in an English language literary context” (10).

4. See, for example, Diken Bülent’s (2004) readings of panopticism in relation to refugee camps.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rita Sakr

Rita Sakr is lecturer in postcolonial and global literatures at Maynooth University, Ireland. She is the author of Monumental Space in the Post-Imperial Novel: An Interdisciplinary Study (2012), and of “Anticipating” the 2011 Arab Uprisings: Revolutionary Literatures and Political Geographies (2013). She is co-editor of The Ethics of Representation in Literature, Art and Journalism: Transnational Responses to the Siege of Beirut (2013) and James Joyce and the Nineteenth-Century French Novel (2011) and co-director and co-producer of White Flags (2014). Her current monograph project is titled “Global Arab Literary Geographies”.