paul veyret

This paper focuses on the literary representation of the a category precariat, pigrants and refugees in Middle Eastern and Muslim countries and the ethical response they elicit. Migrants and refugees, who are assigned a place and a status on the margins of states or who are forcibly displaced by war, famine or natural disasters, are at the heart of two novels by Pakistani writers Mohsin Hamid and Mohammed Hanif, <em>Exit West</em> (2017) and <em>Red Birds</em> (2018). Both novels propose singular responses to the refugee and migrant crisis by combining political commentary and engagement with the norms of realistic representation. <em>Exit West</em> and <em>Red Birds</em> represent attempts to apprehend the migrant crisis and the consequences of the war on terror on the civilian population through the prism of highly aesthetic fictional forms, and not by relying on actual legal definitions and population data. In fact, while <em>...

This article makes use of Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of deterritorialization and lines of flight, together with Aamir R. Mufti’s analysis of global literature in order to study the work of three Pakistani novelists, Nadeem Aslam, Mohsin Hamid, and Kamila Shamsie. Fragmentation, disjunction, and disorientation are the main forces at work in contemporary Pakistani fiction in English, whose founding metaphor is the image of partition, and an insistence of borders and their transgression.

The Unconsaled a pour toile de fond une ville anonyme d'Europe centrale. Le narrateur ,un celebre pianiste nomme Ryder, est cense y donner un concert et en meme temps aider les citoyens a resoudre une crise tout aussi grave que vaguement definie. Il s'agit d'un roman fait de faux-departs: narrateur et lecteur semblent se retrouver regulierement dans les impasses de la metafiction postmoderne. Mais point de faux-depart pour Ishiguro: le roman est articule autour de la problematique de la nostalgie, de la retrospection et de l'ironie du malentendu. Mais avant tout l'atmosphere surrealiste et parfois burlesque subvertissent le recit realiste de maniere vertigineuse.

Postcolonial Interventions, Vol. V, Issue 2
The Ethical Re(turn) in Postcolonial Fiction: Narrating the Precariat in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and Mohammad Hanif’s Red Birds
Paul Veyret
Abstract
This paper focuses on the literary representation of the a category precar- iat, pigrants and refugees in Middle Eastern and Muslim countries and the ethical response they elicit. Migrants and refugees, who are assigned a place and a status on the margins of states or who are forcibly displaced by war, famine or natural disasters, are at the heart of two novels by Pakistani writ- ers Mohsin Hamid and Mohammed Hanif, Exit West (2017) and Red Birds (2018). Both novels propose singular responses to the refugee and migrant crisis by combining political commentary and engagement with the norms of realistic representation. Exit West and Red Birds represent attempts to apprehend the migrant crisis and the consequences of the war on terror on the civilian population through the prism of highly aesthetic fictional forms, and not by relying on actual legal definitions and population data. In fact, while Exit West and Red Birds are politically and ethically commit- ted novels about the socio-economic category of the precariat, narrating precariousness draws attention both on the representation of the precariat as a category, and also on the self-reflexive nature of language. As we shall see, the figure of the migrant is the founding metaphor of the novel, and Thomas Nail’s theories provide a useful tool of interpretation for Exit West, while Butler’s reflections on grievability and precariousness will find connections with Red Birds.
Keywords: Precariat, refugee, Pakistani fiction, grievability, kinopolitics.

This article makes use of Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of deterritorialization and lines of flight, together with Aamir R. Mufti's analysis of global literature in order to study the work of three Pakistani novelists, Nadeem Aslam, Mohsin Hamid, and Kamila Shamsie. Fragmentation, disjunction, and disorientation are the main forces at work in contemporary Pakistani fiction in English, whose founding metaphor is the image of partition, and an insistence of borders and their transgression.

... Dans la fiction extrêmement polarisée d'Ishiguro, la jetée de Weymouth de Stevens et le Shanghaidéchiré par la guerre de Banks sont les deux faces d'une même médaille: le West Country est la même terra incognita que la ville en ruines. ...