Overview

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative. Global Trespassers is the first critical study of cultural representations of minoritized migrant figures permitted to remain and encouraged to prosper in the Global North. In pursuing ‘good immigrant’ figures across a range of fiction, film, memoir, and monodrama since the 1990s, John McLeod exposes the suspect social and cultural dynamics that govern the admission of selected migrant or mobile lives under strict conditions. Working with the double meaning of ‘sanction’ (both permission and prohibition), Global Trespassers uncovers the mendacious, mercurial border logics that fix such figures in prefabricated identities and relations while foregrounding representations of ‘good immigrants’ who trespass outside the constraints of their concession and challenge such modes of assimilation. Examining three global domains where minoritised mobile figures are readily sanctioned – the adoptive family, the sporting arena, the world city – McLeod critically assesses the extent to which trespass makes possible the insurgent rethinking of human personhood and relationality across the ready-made lines of kinship, race, and culture, as expressed in an eclectic variety of key contemporary cultural texts by Stephen Frears, Jackie Kay, Lemn Sissay, Deann Borshay Liem, Caryl Phillips, John Lanchester, Joseph O’Neill, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, Teju Cole, Mohsin Hamid, Tash Aw, and others.

Full Product Details

9781805966340

Table of Contents

Reviews

‘This is, then, a long-awaited work which resourcefully examines the question of the representation of migration from a different angle, while at the same time offering a fresh commentary on how identities continue to evolve in the postcolonial context.’ Iago Rodríguez Diéguez, 452F Journal of Literature

Author Information

John McLeod is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures, School of English, University of Leeds, UK

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