Precarity, Vulnerability, and Ethical Responsibility in Refugee Narratives of English Literature

Abstract

This study explores the significance of contemporary English literature in the context of recreating the ethics and politics of displacement through complex relations between precarity, vulnerability, and responsibility. In this context, through a critical analysis of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, this paper will illustrate how this literature reflects the capacity of refugees to circumvent the limitations of other literature through inventing novel discourses of agency and ethics. The study will explore how this literature reflects refugees as subjects that disclose the vulnerabilities of citizenship and belonging in a global context through exploring how this literature reflects hidden dynamics of depreciation in narratives of nation-states. The paper will argue that this literature reflects how aesthetic discourses of narrative invent spaces for resistance against depreciation in global nation-states. Through a theoretical discourse in relation to Judith Butler’s narrative of precarity and responsibility in aesthetic discourses of narrative, this paper will argue that this literature offers a reflection on aesthetic discourses and invents spaces for resistance in relation to human depreciation. The final argument of this study will conclude that this narrative serves as a critical imaginative space in relation to reconstructing the politics of humanity in a global experience of crisis in relation to aesthetic discourses and acts of displacement. The argument will conclude that this narrative reflects a critical role of crisis in aesthetic discourses within radical spaces of narrative in relation to human experience.