The Doors of Posthuman Sensory Perception in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

Abstract

Humans are limited in what they experience and know by their ability to perceive through the five senses. What happens to those senses in a digital age? This final chapter reads Mohsin Hamid’s sonorous novel Exit West (2017) through the lens of posthuman sensory perception as an attempt to understand the global refugee crisis. Hamid’s book is a window onto a technologically assisted future in which the senses are enhanced by digital advances. His refugees seem powerless, but they make use of technology in unexpected ways which appear to protect them, or at least hold at bay hostile larger forces. Migration creates a gulf between the haves and the have-nots. However, when even the powerless have powerful technologies in their hands, things start to change.