War, Terror and Migration

Abstract

As recent political and military conflicts, particularly in the Middle East, have triggered or exacerbated what is described as a global refugee crisis, contemporary postcolonial literature has attempted to represent the affected people’s experiences of forced exile, refugee movement, and asylum seeking. This is a major shift in postcolonial literature which has traditionally remained engaged with narrating experiences of elite, middle to upper class, migrants, whose cosmopolitan sensibility and outlook has been dominant in postcolonial literature. This chapter analyzes how postcolonial literature has made this shift from the elite to the poor, from the migrant to the exile, from settler to asylum seeker, in its narrative focus. I argue in this chapter that such a shift requires not just a change of focus but also a change of narrative and discursive strategies as the discourse of hybridity and transnationalism that has dominated postcolonial literature and theory so far does not properly reflect the feelings and experiences of people forced to undergo exile and to seek refuge and asylum. To conduct this analysis, I take up Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, which has been critically acclaimed for representing experiences of exile and migration, and discuss the strategies used by the writer to represent this experience.