The impossibility of leaving: Queer migration and Shyam Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghosts

ABSTRACT

This article argues that Shyam Selvadurai’s 2013 novel The Hungry Ghosts is beholden to a number of myths that locate the text within the concerns of queer migration studies. The protagonist Shivan is invested in the mythological promises of the west and of wealth as offering him sexual freedom and recognition, yet these commitments mean he fails to see the contextual and political specificities that cause harm both to himself and to those around him. This article critiques the novel’s conclusion by arguing that its investment in fate is a tool through which the effects of oppressive systems are elided, and the queer migrant is rendered a doomed subject.

KEYWORDS:

• Queer migration
• Shyam Selvadurai
• postcolonial sexuality
• migration
• homocapitalism
• gay racism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Boone (1995), Chari (2001) and Fanon ([1986] 2008) for foundational discussions on the history of racialized sexual fetishization within the context of colonialism.

2. See Haritaworn, Tauqir, and Erdem (2008) and Puar (2007) for further espousal of this paradigm.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Humaira Saeed

Humaira Saeed is an educator and researcher whose work focuses on the intersections of gender, sexuality, critical race and postcolonial studies. She is the recipient of a British Academy Small Research Grant for the project “Exploring Dissident Sexuality in Postcolonial Texts”, and her monograph Persisting Partition: Affect, Memory and Trauma in Women’s Narratives of Pakistan is forthcoming.