(Re)negotiating Empire

Abstract

This paper considers narratives of refugee experience in postcolonial scholarship. Investigating refugee experiences is indispensable to understanding how postcolonial theory applies to narratives that represent involuntary mobilization. It elucidates how the refugee experience casts an idiosyncratic outlook on the Western and Orientalist formulations, bringing to light a renegotiation of the dynamics of the distinction between the two. Looking at Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, I argue that Hope challenges the naturalized authenticity of Western superiority by employing the refugee trope as a rhetorical counter-narrative of core paradigms of Eurocentrism, contesting the Western ideologies that consolidate this naturalized Western superiority by establishing a parallel paradigm of power between the two locales—West and East.