Racialized Hostipitality and Narrative Resistance in Sharon Bala’s The Boat People

Abstract

Sharon Bala’s The Boat People (2018) is at once a trauma narrative bearing witness to the ravages of Sri Lanka’s civil war, as well as a powerful portrayal of the racialized interpellation of refugee-immigrants from the Global South. A fictionalized account of the Sri Lankan refugees who arrived in Canada on board the ships Ocean Lady in 2009 and MV Sun Sea in 2010, the novel challenges the facile and depersonalized portrayals of asylum seekers that are proliferated uncritically in media. Bala presents a humane and humanizing counter narrative that challenges the arbitrary naming, shaming, and dehumanizing discourse that labels asylum seekers as “terrorists,” “illegals,” “thugs,” and “foreign criminals,” all labels used by Canadian anti-immigrant factions to brand the Sri Lanka asylum seekers in The Boat People. In this paper, drawing on the Derridian neologism “hostipitality,” I introduce the concept of “racialized hostipitality” to understand how Bala sheds light on the racialized and bifurcated nature of Canadian immigration law. By demonstrating how immigration law embeds both hospitality and hostility, and how hospitality is conditionally offered only to the “good immigrants,” I argue that Bala’s novel unveils the racialized hostipitality that conditions Canadian immigration law as portrayed in the novel.