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Description
This paper explores the role of literature in articulating and responding to global crises by analyzing Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West. In the novel, literature becomes a medium through which the migrant experience is both documented and reimagined, transforming geopolitical crises into affective and narrative ones. Exit West subverts traditional representations of migration by introducing magical doors that dissolve national borders, offering a speculative lens through which to examine displacement, identity, and transformation.
Rather than portraying migration only through political or economic frameworks, the novel emphasizes the psychological and emotional dimensions of crisis. It captures the rupture of home, the trauma of forced movement, and the search for continuity in the face of instability. Through sparse prose and fragmented structure, Hamid evokes the disorientation and fluidity of living in crisis, while offering a space for empathy, reflection, and reconfiguration.
Drawing from literary trauma theory, affect studies, and crisis literature scholarship, this paper argues that Exit West exemplifies how contemporary fiction can expand our understanding of crisis beyond news cycles and policy debates. Literature does not simply represent crisis; it reshapes our engagement with it by foregrounding interiority, relationality, and the human condition. Ultimately, the novel invites readers to witness migration not just as a political act, but as an existential and affective journey and it underscores literature’s vital role in bearing witness to global precarity.
| Keywords | literature and crisis, migration, affect, displacement, Exit West, contemporary fiction, trauma theory |
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| nilsuguezeler@gmail.com |