Decentering Modernity through Displacement: Refugee Literature, Asylum, and the Afterlives of Empire

Abida Younas, University of Warwick

This paper examines how contemporary refugee literature unsettles Western-centric narratives of modernity by foregrounding displacement as constitutive, rather than exceptional, to the modern global order. While dominant social science frameworks position modernity as a Western project defined by legal rationality, state sovereignty, and universal rights, contemporary asylum regimes reveal its uneven, racialised, and exclusionary operations. Drawing on postcolonial theory and migration studies, this paper argues that refugee governance—through deterrence, externalisation, and bureaucratic delay—embodies the ongoing afterlives of imperial power within modern state systems. Bringing literary analysis into dialogue with international asylum law and migration policy, the paper reads No Land to Light On by Yara Zgheib and The Haunting of Hajji Hotak by Jamil Jan Kochai as critical sites for rethinking modernity from its margins. These texts reveal how contemporary border regimes produce forms of life marked by temporal suspension, surveillance, and legal precarity, challenging the assumption that modernity guarantees protection, mobility, or rights. By foregrounding affective experiences such as waiting, haunting, and uncertainty, refugee narratives expose the limits of legal modernity and its claims to universality. Rather than viewing displacement as a failure of modern institutions, the paper argues that refugee literature reveals it as structurally embedded within global modernity itself. In doing so, it contributes to broader efforts to decenter modernity by situating refugee experience as a critical lens through which to understand the historical entanglements of empire, mobility, and uneven development.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 52. Migration Affects