Borders and Freedom, Autonomy and Postcolonial Subjectivity in Mohsin Hamid's Exit West

Abstract

In this paper I examine Mohsin Hamid’s novel Exit West, in which abrupt transnational portals of magical realism lay bare ongoing political, economic, and psychological hurdles to twenty-first-century migration through a broad postcolonial lens. The doors democratize mobility across geographies, circumventing real physical border infrastructure, but they don’t accomplish much to alter global systems of power. Grounded on the seminal ideas of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Frantz Fanon, this book examines the ways in which displaced individuals negotiate a partial and complicated autonomy. The research looks at how the characters transcend Western orientalist tropes and colonial spatial segregation, following the shift from displacement to the establishment of hybrid communities in liminal contact zones. It also intersects with modern criticisms of state sovereignty, biopolitics and wall-building by scholars such as Wendy Brown, Giorgio Agamben and Saskia Sassen to show that postcolonial migration entails ongoing navigation of entrenched imperial mechanisms. Finally, the study argues that in spite of the re-emergence of national borders and institutional confinement, the displaced recover narrative agency and self-determination, showing postcolonial subjectivity as a dynamic and resilient negotiation between historical heritage and current survival.