Migration as Method, Death as Border: Necropolitics and Speculative Cosmopolitanism in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

Abstract

This article’s distinct intervention is to theorize Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West as practicing speculative cosmopolitanism: a narrative method that couples the “autonomy of migration” with informal, care-based affiliations beyond the nation-state. Through a triangulated reading that brings together border-as-method, necropolitical governance, and urban informality with cosmopolitan ethics, the essay argues that the novel’s magical doors do not merely elide sovereignty; they operationalize migration as a world-making practice, reframing space as contingent and mobile. At the same time, Exit West reveals how racialized migrants are rendered hypervisible and disposable within securitized urban zones, particularly London’s fractured architectures of control, producing subjects through death, delay, and managed precarity. Turning from diagnosis to possibility, the article reads squatter communities and improvised collectives as speculative laboratories of postnational affiliation, where heterogeneous, precarious forms of cohabitation model relational ethics under scarcity. In this account, Exit West is not only a narrative of displacement but an experiment in world-making, an imaginative refusal of the carceral state and a fragile blueprint for shared futurity.