The poetics of the (un)named city in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

Abstract

ABSTRACT Cities in Mohsin Hamid’s fiction appear as menacing, over-powering spaces, whether in presenting the possibility of violence in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, or as in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia and Exit West, in representing an unnamed city facing conflict. This article examines the construction of the unnamed city in Exit West, which deploys the trope of namelessness, both to throw light on the eerie similarity of cities that face violence and to narrate the urban experience of the Global South metropolis. By drawing from Saskia Sassen’s study of the “global city” and Manfred B. Steger’s concept of the “global imaginary”, it interrogates the novel’s unnamed city and reflects on the invisible forces of globalization being reimagined through the movement of the refugee. The refugee figure becomes the lens through which Hamid politicizes the north-south divide and visualizes a more egalitarian future.