Minakshi Paul
Assistant Professor of English, Kandra Radhakanta Kundu Mahavidyalaya. Email: mp951204@gmail.com
Volume 13, Number 3, 2021 I Full-Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n3.34
Abstract
One of the essential aspects which have been perpetually constituting and reconstituting the tumultuous geopolitical space of South Asia is its interface with the Global North. An inherent element of this interface materializes in terms of the rapidly escalating proportion of the displaced population from the Islamic South Asian and Central Asian countries afflicted with intense political tensions seeking shelter in the Global North regenerating the ground for the imperialist exclusionary politics in a newer manifestation. Considering the tensional position of the Islamic communities in global politics, British-Pakistani writer Moshin Hamid’s novel Exit West (2017) provides a platform for exploring the plight of the refugees from Islamic states of South Asia in the fortress regime of Global North who are denied being assimilated either in their home state in Global South or in the host countries of the Global North thus problematizing their political status. Corroborating Giorgio Agamben’s dismissal of national borders, Hamid deploys the trope of magical doors in his novel that instantaneously delivers the protagonists to different nations rendering the geopolitical borders meaningless. As the concerned conference aspires to obviate the thick smog of western critical theories which fail to address the local issues and local cultural experience, the present paper in this context examines the novel as an aesthetic and poetical account of the hostility and resentment of the indigenous population and assimilated citizenry towards the refugees, the primal loss of their psychic experience of ‘home’ challenging the ‘ethnonationalism’ and the right-wing populism of the western nations invoking the readers to acknowledge the truth of ‘Postnationalism’. This paper thus attempts to diagnose the methods of negotiating the tensional correspondence between Global North and Global South on account of these refugees with contested political and social identities imploring the readers to reexamine the gaps in the complacent, coherent identity of South Asia as a geopolitical unit.
Keywords: South Asia, Refugee, Postnationalism, citizenship, Global North
