Postcolonial Asylum Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law

As part of the trend of searching for new directions (eco-criticism; globalization; Islamic identities) in postcolonial studies, this book is concerned with asylum as a key emerging postcolonial field. It argues that asylum seekers' engagement with the law, and the exclusionary culture of host nations, casts them as the latest incarnation of the infrahuman other which was the foundation of colonial sovereignty. Postcolonial studies has typically understood geographical displacement in terms of hybridity and self-fashioning. The book argues that asylum seekers' relationships with the host nation are framed by a relation of 'inclusive exclusion'-abandoned by the law which often deprives asylum claimants of political and social agency, but simultaneously captured by the law's vested interest in (re)producing them as the citizen's 'dark other'-which conventional postcolonial ideas of 'creative migrancy' must acknowledge if they are to speak about new forms of political identity and belonging in the globalized world.The book's range is geographically and disciplinarily extensive, taking a self-consciously inter-disciplinary approach to British, EU and Australasian contexts. Farrier engages with asylum legislation, legal theory and ethics in readings of the work of asylum seeker and postcolonial authors and filmmakers, including J.M. Coetzee, Caryl Phillips, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Leila Aboulela, Stephen Frears, Pawel Pawlikowski and Michael Winterbottom. These readings are framed by the work of non-postcolonial (Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Ranci+re) and postcolonial theorists (Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, Achille Mbembe, Gayatri Spivak), in order to institute what Spivak calls a 'step beyond' postcolonial studies; one that carries with it the insights and limitations of the discipline as it looks to new ways for postcolonial studies to engage with the world.

David Farrier is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary English Literature at the University of Edinburgh.