Building resilience in Lawrence Hill’s The Illegal

ABSTRACT

Canadian writer Lawrence Hill's 2015 novel The Illegal provides deep insights into the legal and social restrictions imposed on refugees in their host countries, which often exacerbate their vulnerability. Drawing on Judith Butler's theorizing about the interconnection between vulnerability and agency and recent resilience thinking, this article explores Hill’s literary rendition of how the refugees’ material conditions of vulnerability may trigger forms of agency that result in resilience-building, social integration, and more self-aware and just societies. By examining the interconnection between tropes of vulnerability and resilience in The Illegal, this article posits that Hill’s elaborations on notions of resilience partake in a new post-trauma aesthetics that goes beyond the notions of victimization and inarticulateness – the main focus of trauma theory – to envision new mechanisms for the agency and empowerment of the vulnerable.

KEYWORDS:

• Resilience
• refugees
• vulnerability
• agency
• social recognition
• The Illegal

Acknowledgements

The author is deeply grateful to Prof. Ana María Fraile-Marcos for her invaluable help, critical insights, and helpful suggestions and comments on earlier versions of this article. The author wishes to thank the editor, Prof. Janet Wilson, and anonymous reviewers at the Journal of Postcolonial Writing for their rigorous and insightful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation, and Universities [FPU16/06198] and the research project ”Narrating Resilience, Achieving Happiness? Toward a Cultural Narratology” [PID2020-113190GB-C22], graciously funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.

Notes on contributors

Sara Casco-Solís

Sara Casco-Solís is a lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of Salamanca, Spain. Her main research interests include contemporary Canadian fiction, resilience, vulnerability, trauma, and refugee studies. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto, Canada, and at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She is the author of several articles and book chapters including “Resisting Resilience in Neoliberal Times: Rawi Hage’s Cockroach” (2019).