Postmigration in a Global World: Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

Extensive migration to Europe from North Africa, the Middle East and the Far East is a daily reality. Various reasons may drive migrants to escape: wars, religious or ethnic persecution, famine, poverty and environmental disasters. Migrants, asylum seekers and refugees have become transnational actors of change and transformation in the “First World”, continuously re-defining their own existence and the equilibrium of their host countries. Mohsin Hamid’s novel Exit West imagines a world where global mobility and different forms of place-making seem to be the norm. By narrating the life of his characters ‒ a couple fleeing from an unnamed city, which is undergoing a political apocalypse, first to Mikonos, then to Britain and later to California ‒ the author is able to depict the global map of planetary changes and transformations. My contribution will analyse Hamid’s novel in the light of concepts elaborated in postcolonial theory and migration studies.