The Novel and the Refugee: Contemporary Global Fiction and the Imaginary of Border Regimes

The Novel and the Refugee: Contemporary Global Fiction and the Imaginary of Border Regimes (NARFIB) will investigate an emerging trend in contemporary fiction which engages with the global escalation of harsh border regimes since 9/11 that have sanctioned the state’s capacity for extraordinary measures against ‘outsiders’ to protect ‘insiders’.

The rise of what I identify as the ‘global border novel’ coincides with the acute mass displacement around the globe, with an unprecedented one hundred million refugees as of May 2022, exceeding the previous year’s statistics by an alarming 10 million (Siegfried, UNHCR).

NARFIB conceives of the border novel as a cultural product that mediates and is mediated by the contemporary border imaginary.

The border novel iterates fictional spaces in which characters live out the affective and material impacts of the border’s disciplinary power.

For these characters—on both ends of the spectrum of citizenship, whether refugees or ‘core’ citizens of Global North—the border signals the psychic and material exposure to the internal contradictions and limitations of liberal democracies in the face of their precarious futures, while the figure of the refugee points to precisely where a greater number of citizens will end up, that is, a victim of the border.

NARFIB dwells in this problem by assuming an interlinked relationship between refugee fiction, the recent escalations of border control, and the ways that the border imaginary renders the political panic about unsettling the residual myth of the mono-cultural state.NARFIB will develop a transdisciplinary methodology by synthesizing the latest research in border studies, literary studies, surveillance studies and political psychology.

NARFIB will be conducted in the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages (ILOS) at the University of Oslo (UiO), and in collaboration with the supervisor of the project, Professor Johan Schimanski.