Migration is one of the defining phenomena of the 21st century. At the same time, however, migration itself is being redefined by a wide range of cultural, social, and technological developments, from the rise of anti-migration sentiment in the Global North to digital technologies. Contemporary literature of migration, understood as literary works thematically and formally committed to engage with people on the move, is representing these changes through formal experimentation. This PhD dissertation examines contemporary novels of migration employing a research framework that combines narrative theory and critical posthumanism. In particular, my thesis is that approaching contemporary novels of migration through critical posthumanism can help demonstrate how narratives of migration are moving beyond conventional cultural, spatial, and identitarian themes to offer more complex and nuanced reflections on what it means to be on the move today. In this project, I show how narrating migration in the 21st century means considering it together with technological advancements, anthropogenic climate change, and capitalist exploitation; it means foregrounding nonhuman entities and shifting the expectations that readers and listeners might have about linear narrative structures and narrative closure.
My PhD project has two foci: firstly, it provides narratological insight into the narrative strategies employed by novels of migration that experiment with form; secondly, it embraces critical posthumanism to explore the ways in which these novels engage with or subvert specific themes. Speculative fiction and narrative form, technology and distance, subjectivity and narrative identity, ethics of listening and sounds are at the center of each of the four chapters of the dissertation in which I explore these themes by looking at eight novels as case studies. These novels include works by Ling Ma, Teju Cole, Mohsin Hamid, Valeria Luiselli, John Lanchester, Richard Powers, Rabih Alameddine, and Kamila Shamsie. By positioning itself at the intersection of migration and mobility studies, critical posthumanism, and narrative theory, this research project aims to offer a new perspective on how to read, examine, and appreciate novels of migration through their formal strategies.