Inverting the Coordinates: Place, Dystopia and Utopia in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

This paper attends to the utopian imagination circulating in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997). These texts exemplify the formal innovation assigned to migrancy fiction more generally, a genre characterised by its embrace of mobility in content as well as in form. Alongside migrancy novels, utopian fiction both maps and distorts the networks and infrastructures that generate wealth inequality on a global scale. But while previous studies have touched on the utopian implications to migration fiction, this paper elaborates on the affordances of placing these fields into full dialogue. To develop this last point, this paper draws from Mary Louise Pratt’s influential concept of the contact zone in order to acknowledge the different scales of utopian thinking within (and between) Tropic of Orange, which demarcates a specific utopian community, and Exit West, which imagines a global commons. Approaching these texts through the lens of the contact zone helps bring into focus how mundane technologies create inequality today but might be repurposed to radically remake society in the future.

One of the essential aspects which have been perpetually constituting and reconstituting the tumultuous geopolitical space of South Asia is its interface with the Global North. An inherent element of this interface materializes in terms of the rapidly escalating proportion of the displaced population from the Islamic South Asian and Central Asian countries afflicted with intense political tensions seeking shelter in the Global North regenerating the ground for the imperialist exclusionary politics in a newer manifestation. Considering the tensional position of the Islamic communities in global politics, British-Pakistani writer Moshin Hamid’s novel Exit West (2017) provides a platform for exploring the plight of the refugees from Islamic states of South Asia in the fortress regime of Global North who are denied being assimilated either in their home state in Global South or in the host countries of the Global North thus problematizing their political status. Corroborating Giorgio Agamben’s dismissal of national borders, Hamid deploys the trope of magical doors in his novel that instantaneously delivers the protagonists to different nations rendering the geopolitical borders meaningless. As the concerned conference aspires to obviate the thick smog of western critical theories which fail to address the local issues and local cultural experience, the present paper in this context examines the novel as an aesthetic and poetical account of the hostility and resentment of the indigenous population and assimilated citizenry towards the refugees, the primal loss of their psychic experience of ‘home’ challenging the ‘ethnonationalism’ and the right-wing populism of the western nations invoking the readers to acknowledge the truth of ‘Postnationalism’. This paper thus attempts to diagnose the methods of negotiating the tensional correspondence between Global North and Global South on account of these refugees with contested political and social identities imploring the readers to reexamine the gaps in the complacent, coherent identity of South Asia as a geopolitical unit.

The core objective of the work was to investigate and reconnoiter globalization and its heinous impacts on modern society. Xenophobia and hostility towards migrants are some of the greatest issues faced by the migrant people in this globalized world. As a result, they have suffered from psychological trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, which may follow a variety of traumatic events. The researcher tried to analyze the discontents of globalization and post-traumatic stress concerning the fictional world created by Mohsin Hamid in his novel Exit West (2017). This study was based on qualitative research, interpretation of the novel in the light of globalization and its impacts in the present scenario. For thematic analysis, the model of acculturation proposed by Berry (2006) had been adopted. The researcher mainly focused on the characters and the impact of migration on these characters in the context of globalization and psychological trauma.

This essay explores how contemporary speculative fiction can offer new ways of imagining the refugee experience. Looking at Omar El Akkad’s American War (2017) and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017), it argues that the cognitive estrangement effect, or the way in which each text encourages the reader to distance themselves from reality, can help the reader build a bridge between the world of the refugee and that of the reader. Central to the discussion will be the genre’s use of the term novum, with reference to concepts of time and space. Not only do these elements contribute to achieving cognitive estrangement, they also have a fundamental role to play in the lives of refugees. Drawing a parallel between the novum as speculative fiction’s most important trope and the role of the real novum in refugee lives shows how the genre reflects the disruptive changes brought about by the displacement of refugee populations. In addition, the flexible use of time in each text has proven to be a useful tool for helping the reader imagine how being a refugee impacts on one’s sense of time and, subsequently, one’s agency—an element which will be explored through an analysis of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the habitus, as well as insights from David Hoy’s reading of Martin Heidegger’s prioritisation of the future. As speculative fiction’s main task is to imagine alternative realities, a third central element of the discussion will be ways in which the genre utilises space. Ultimately, it is argued that refugee narratives do not have to be strictly realist, as fantastical elements help readers to transcend the personal imagination— and sometimes that is what is needed to envisage the unthinkable.

The article offers a comparative account of Raymond Williams’s The Fight for Manod and E. P. Thompson’s The Sykaos Papers and examines their depiction of social and political realities during the late twentieth century, the meeting of socialist and ecological concerns in their fictional world, as well as their allegiance to William Morris’s utopian vision. The article also aims to place Williams’s and Thompson’s fiction in an often-neglected thread of the modern utopian tradition, which tends to combine utopian and dystopian elements.

The article sheds light on the cultural reception of Walking of Agapios to Paradise, an apocryphal Christian apocalypse of early Byzantine origin, in Ukrainian medieval and early modern literature. In the territory of Rus’ the earliest known translation into Old Church Slavonic was found in the Uspensky Codex of the 12th – 13th century with the title “The Narration of Our Father Agapios about whoever takes his cross and follows Christ”. Along with “The Walk of Zosima to Rahman”, and “The Tale of Macarius of Rome”, this text is a part of the apocryphal corpus full of marvels and fantastic elements and dedicated to the theme of extremely difficult and voluntary journeys of mortals to the earthly paradise. This study is an attempt to trace national varieties of Ukrainian adaptations of the legendary plot and compare Greek redactions of the text (focusing on the Athens manuscript), “The Narration of Our Father Agapious...” from the Uspensky Codex with the late versions of “Walking of Agapios to Paradise” in Ukrainian compilations of the 16th and 17th centuries. It is proven that, in contrast to numerous works of translated literature, “paradisal” apocrypha during adaptation to the local culture were not subjected to radical changes, apart from the fact that both in the Uspensky Codex and early modern Ukrainian manuscripts exotic and fantastic elements found in the Greek original text are reduced to a minimum, whereas the symbolic dimension of narration is fundamental. Special attention is paid to translation strategies of scribes of the Uspensky Codex, Belarusian manuscript from the Chudov Monastery (the 16th century), and Stepan Komarevsky’s manuscript (the 17th century). It is hypothesized that transformation of Agapios the Pilgrim into Agapit the Healer in the late Ukrainian compilations, as well as completely rewritten final episodes of the text in Belarusian manuscript from the Chudov Monastery, can be influenced by the original literature of the Kyivan State, namely “Kyiv-Pechersk Patericon” and the local cult of St. Agapit Pechersky.

Hope in the Age of Dystopia: The Ghost in the Machine in Øyvind Rimbereid's <i>Solaris korrigert</i>

Forecasters have been revising downward te figures for energy demand during the past decade at such a rate that what was once considered a utopian vision is becoming accepted as conventional wisdom. Old econometric models are bein discarded as new relationships are introduced. A striking indication of change lies in the shifting relation between energy and the gross national product. Before the 1973 to 1974 oil embargo, energy use increased faster than economic growth. Since then, however, that trend has reversed. Energy demand now increases less rapidly than the economy. The experts' forecasts for energy use in the United States for the year 2000 or 2010 have changed so radically that the lowest energy-demand projection (125 x 10/sup 15/ Btu) made in 1972 by Amory Lovins, a low-growth advocate, was higher than the highest projection (124 x 10/sup 15/ Btu) made in 1977 to 1978 by Ralph Lapp. The author cautions that it does not mean the new trend in energy prophecy will produce more-accurate information than the old trend. The abrupt reversal does suggest, according to the author, that a radical change is working its way through the economy. (SAC)

There is little law and even less law enforcement in Martinaise—a fictional district of a fictional city on a fictional archipelago in which a fictional video game, Disco Elysium, is set. This Essay is about what Disco Elyisum’s narrative and gameplay reveal about the nature of law, the effects of its absence, and the challenges associated with transforming an illegitimate legal system. This is not the first essay to consider what a video game has to say about jurisprudence. But I break new ground by bringing video-game-inspired insights about law to bear on a particular criminal legal system: that of the United States. Specifically, I compare and contrast the limitations of law in Disco Elysium and the game’s pessimism about the prospects of systemic change within its fictional world, on the one hand; and the limitations of the U.S. criminal legal system and ongoing, radically optimistic efforts to transform—even abolish—the latter, on the other. Like that of Martinaise, the criminal legal system of the U.S. often fails to meaningfully constrain state power and suffers from crippling democratic deficits. But the U.S. is the site of emergent social movements that are committed to participatory and inclusive democracy, and is structured by a constitution that has inspired and empowered people to contest state power throughout U.S. history. In its very pessimism about the prospects of legal transformation in its own world, Disco Elysium encourages optimism about radical change in ours.

U tsuho Monogatari1 -4M t4 ('The Tale of the Hollow Tree') is a court romance of the late tenth century, generally attributed, with some uncertainty, to the famous scholar and poet, Minamoto no Shitago NOlR, 911-983. In recent years the work has gained increasing attention from Japanese literary scholars because of the significant contributions it is thought to have made toward the development of the monogatari of the Heian period. Its great length runs to many times that of any previous work, and as the story progresses through its several parts, radical changes take place in the mode and technique of the narrative. In its first section it is pure romance, containing many elements of the fantastic and based heavily upon traditional materials; by its third part it has developed into an imaginative but essentially realistic narrative set firmly in a fictional world that reflects the court society of the time. For this reason, the work is often spoken of as having opened up new possibilities for fiction in a period when prose literature consisted of written versions of traditional oral tales, which were generally quite fantastic in nature, and ostensibly factual accounts, such as diaries and stories about actual historical figures. Utsuho Monogatari is thus held to have played a major role in paving the way for the brilliant Genji Monogatari iP fi; ('The Tale of Genji'), ca. 1010, written about a quarter century later. The tale is about three-fifths the length of Genji Monogatari, and has twenty maki, or chapters. It can be divided into four main parts, of which the passage translated here represents the climax of the third. The first part (Chapter 1) opens with Kiyowara no Toshikage's i shipwreck, his fantastic encounters with

The unification of the two German states changed the geo-political, economic, social, and cultural borders of Germany and Europe. This volume in three parts researches how East German and West German authors and directors reacted to these radical changes. The basis of this research are fictional, autobiographical, journalistic, and cinematic texts. The authors and directors presented in this volume not only comment on the changes which they themselves experienced but also voice their changing attitudes to their own past within the divided Germany.

The paper is an attempt at illustrating the radical changes in the way in which gender, media and literature interact. Its intention is also to examine the ways in which the media and new digital technologies contribute to representations of gender-linked communication in the novels written by Vida Ognjenović, Ljubica Arsić, Tamara Jecić and Dunja Radosavljević. The new informational technologies have managed to capture the voices lingering at the margins, helping women transcend their real-life grounded identities and explore new narrative practices. The process of identification of women's social self as depicted in contemporary Serbian women's writing (such as Dunja Radosavljević's Life After America, Tamara Jecić's Stinky Onion, Vida Ognjenović's The Address is Correct and Ljubica Arsić's All Inclusive) lavishly uses computer mediated communication. These books introduce different kinds of women's narratives, ranging from intimate confessions in letters and journals to experimental practices involving different points of view and focalisation. The aim of the paper is to analyze the ways gender is redefined in the cyberrituals of womanhood.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the latest science fiction series in the context of the mind-body philosophical problems. The synthesis of theoretical knowledge and empirical science (phenomenological, psychoanalytic, neurophysical and cybernetic experience) is used for the analysis. Prospects for the development of artificial intelligence, including the issue of creating self-conscious robots, unfold not only in science fiction but also in reality thus causing the high ratings of the cyberpunk genre. The destruction of the boundary between man and machine, natural and artificial body, physical and non-physical, real and virtual, is the key point of the newest series The Black Mirror, Electric Dreams of Philip K. Dick, Altered Carbon, Westworld. Mind-body dialectics in philosophy construed by R. Descartes and B. Spinoza, further developed by phenomenologists, is actualized today in the context of technological development. Despite the insights and warnings of science fiction writers, scientists seek for making the breakthrough in the invention of an artificial man. This tendency is caused, first of all, by the desire to conceive the arrangement of human consciousness: how it is generated by matter - the network of neurons of the brain. Solving this philosophical dilemma inevitably leads to unpredictable consequences and radical changes in the development of civilization. Nevertheless, this step is fatal in the general tendency of demiurgy and mimesis, which underlie all the cultural, creative and aesthetic activities of mankind. The author comes to the conclusion that cinema demonstrates models of the possible development of events and the consequences of technogenic tendencies, while the reality clearly indicates that the era of posthumanism has already begun, and were witnessing the most incredible scenarios created by the world of science fiction.

The article deals in problem with constructing of space of fictional world in texts of collective poems Jolly Cemetery by Vasyl Stus (1971), and some parameters of poetics of the space modeling (imagenary, genre, composition). Radical points of interest to topography of space and local specifics of territories are: total elimination of space markers for creating mythical universal (here and everywhere) and detailed presentation of landscape or interier in some autobiographycal poems. As result of research three types of space modeling are describes. The first model is one-dimensional cosmos of absurd soviet every-day life described in narrative poetry. The second ones proposes two-dimensional world in texts of accumulative composition: physical space of human existence (as variant of it: human body/soul) and inner space of meditation, or memoirs of bygone days, or visions and dreams. Sometimes accumulative fragments are constructed to be a separate locus full of things and inhabitants (subterranian reservuar). Their forms are allegorical emblems or narrative episodes on private, political or hystorical motifs. The third model is metaphysical poetic proposition of configuration of three locis planis (three worlds) and man’s ability to move from one to another. Symbol of jolly cemetery and status of dead person is correspondent with one-dimentional world of soviet peoples’ life; and overcoming repressions and control by power authority, preserving of self and human reactions are related with two other space models.

This paper examines the relationship between the fantastic and trauma in the detective novels of Kate Atkinson and Ahmet Ümit within the theory of Comparative Literature. Based on Cathy Carruth’s Trauma Theory, the paper aims to explore how Atkinson and Ümit employ fantastic elements such as ghosts and time-traveling in their detective novels to unmask the traumatic events rooted in the memories of the patriarchal cultures where they have been living. It is suggested that both Atkinson and Ümit lead the reader to discover the silenced narratives of marginalized people such as women, children, and men that do not belong to the male dominant ruling class in their societies by creating a fictional world where the ghosts help the characters to detect their personal and cultural wounds stemming from male-dominated social environments. Thereby, the writers offer some healing to the marginalized people by giving them a voice and also contribute to creating integrity and union within their societies.