This study undertakes an exploration of representations of the migrant body in current English literature by acknowledging the human body as more than a neutral biological entity. It is a site of political struggle a focus of bio political control and a location of postcolonial resistance. Utilizing the theoretical works of Foucault in terms of his notion of bio politics that of Agamben and his concept of bare life or that of the homo sacer and that of Butler and her ideas of precarity and somatic performativity this paper shall examine a variety of narratives which outline and detail the physical violence experienced by bodies in transit at the edge of the West. Mohsin Hamid’s novel Exit West (2017) shall serve as a primary source for this study and in particular attention shall be paid to how the novel dismantles physical and geographical borders in order to reveal the migrant body as a political frontier or living border a body which harbors and carries a somatic archive of trauma and which is further valorized as commodity of the neoliberal economy. Importantly whilst the body of the migrant is put under constant surveillance by the Western metropolis and put to work for the profit of the metropolis in order to be in the end dispossessed and expelled the bodies under study here are never mere victims of circumstances and by virtue of their very physical presence by somatic solidarity of other bodies and by means of their cultural-somatic hybridity. They resist and critique the fully backed up promises of humanitarianism of globalization.
Keywords: Liminality, Resistance, bare life, biopolitics, exit west, mohsin hamid, postcolonial criticism, precarity, somatic, the migrant body
