Disorienting empathy: reimagining the global border regime through Mohsin Hamid's exit west
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- dc.contributor.author Bellin, Stefano
- dc.date.accessioned 2025-10-09T09:20:38Z
- dc.date.available 2025-10-09T09:20:38Z
- dc.date.issued 2022
- dc.date.updated 2025-10-09T09:20:38Z
- dc.description.abstract This article explores how literature can sensitise us to our potential implication in the injustice and violence of the global border regime. The violence of borders today sustains a large economic and political system that "produces precarity and disposability, exposes migrants and refugees to harm and exploitation, and reinforces global inequalities". While it manifests itself in direct events, policies, and actions, the violence produced by the global border regime is structural, widespread, and racially charged. Citizens of the global North are not precisely perpetrators of border violence, yet they bear a certain kind of political responsibility for the experiences of trauma, death, impoverishment, and discrimination that borders generate and institutionalise. Reading Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017), I investigate how we can recognise ourselves in the position of the 'implicated subject' (Michael Rothberg) through a process of what I call 'disorienting empathy¿' This form of expanded and self-aware perspective-taking elicits our concern for others, but simultaneously de-centres our self, leading us to reflect critically on our subject position and on our potential indirect involvement in systemic violence. By examining Exit West's literary strategies, I argue that empathy, non-appropriative identification, and disorientation can generate a self-reflexivity about our responsibility in relation to the global border regime. Drawing on affect theory, literary theory, migration studies, and critical race theory, the article highlights contemporary fiction's capacity to represent diasporic experiences and reimagine the freedom of movement in the twenty-first century.
- dc.format.mimetype application/pdf
- dc.identifier.citation Bellin S. Disorienting empathy: reimagining the global border regime through Mohsin Hamid's exit west. Literature compass. 2022;19(12):e12694. DOI: 10.1111/lic3.12694
- dc.identifier.doi https://dx.doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12694
- dc.identifier.issn 1741-4113
- dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/10230/71446
- dc.language.iso eng
- dc.publisher Wiley
- dc.relation.ispartof Literature compass. 2022;19(12):e12694.
- dc.rights This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2022 The Authors. Literature Compass published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
- dc.rights.accessRights info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
- dc.rights.uri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- dc.subject.keyword Borders
- dc.subject.keyword Disorientation
- dc.subject.keyword Empathy
- dc.subject.keyword Implication
- dc.subject.keyword Refugees
- dc.subject.keyword Responsibility
- dc.subject.keyword Solidarity
- dc.title Disorienting empathy: reimagining the global border regime through Mohsin Hamid's exit west
- dc.type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
- dc.type.version info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion