The Contemporary Global Anglophone Novel, Mobility, and Crisis

Abstract

In this article, I construct a framework to analyze a subcategory of contemporary global Anglophone novels which I refer to as “crisis novels.” This type of novel ostensibly seems to present a radical or liberatory approach to various imperially inflected crises in the Global South, but upon a closer look, instead functions as a way to assuage guilt for the reader in the Global North. In order to assist in the task of “contextualizing the global Anglophone novel,” I offer readings of two recent novels, Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, both published in 2017. These novels utilize a decontextualized sense of crisis that caters to a fantasy that it is possible to get past or go beyond neocolonial systems of oppression and violence; the emerging trope of “crisis,” while taking on trappings of the Global South, obfuscates the actual Global South in its eagerness to present a hopeful vision of the future. Using Mimi Sheller’s concept of “mobility justice” as a springboard, I argue that the crisis novel is a constituent part of the genre of the global Anglophone novel in the way that it moves past postcolonial concerns of nation-state formation and towards a decontextualized, globalized sense of mobility and migration. I conclude by arguing that the lack of urgency in these texts, in terms of both temporality and geography, means that these novels present narratives that are superficially critical of power formations but fail to present readers with any kind of alternative or radical vision.