Although migration and surveillance are not new phenomenon, our age of neoliberal capitalism with its revival of nationalist extremism and a hypocritic vision of a borderless world, is experiencing unprecedented amount of migration and new forms of surveillance. As critics like Achille Mbembe and Matthew Longo emphasize, we have entered an age of relentless borderization and ruthless surveillance. Critics such as Simone Browne, Christian Parenti, Metahaven, Shoshana Zuboff, Michel Foucault, Bernard Harcourt, and David Lyon explore the history, logics, nature, means and effects of surveillance. All would agree that surveillance is a means of sustaining the existing inequalities and shaping new discrimination in our societies. The surveillance of migrants is a way to exploit them based on the exclusionary and discriminatory logics which hide the history of capitalist or colonialist dispossession. Many contemporary global anglophone fictions explore how neoliberal capitalism uses and normalizes modern forms of surveillance to track, monitor and exploit the migrants in our world. With the representation of the complexity of migrant lives, the literary forms of resistance and visions of alternative forms of life, these texts destabilize the linear and homogeneous logics of surveillance which overlook the non-linear and heterogeneous forms of migrant life.

In diverse ways, the papers in this panel explore how contemporary global anglophone literature on migration and surveillance emphasize the complex effects of surveillance, and how the texts’ forms and their characters’ resilience disrupt the homogeneous narratives of surveillance. In “Watching the camp: Surveillance, Narrative Resistance, and Carceral Migration in Behrouz Boochani,” Zahra F. Tavana reads Boochani’s fragmented and polyphonic narrative as a response to the “Kyriarchal System” which is a structure that is sustained through constant observation, bureaucratic documentation, and enforced invisibility. Alongside theories of surveillance and carcerality, she uses Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogism to prove her argument. The most powerful fact of the paper seems to be that it focuses on how the text’s emergence within the surveillance structures through encrypted mobile communication and collaborative translation challenge the efforts of surveillance to produce silence. The paper ultimately contends that contemporary migration literature reframes surveillance not merely as repression but as a generative condition for new narrative forms. It highlights that Boochani’s work demonstrates how literary experimentation becomes mode of survival, transforming surveillance into a contested terrain where migrants reclaim authorship over their own representation.

In “Haunting Surveillance: Migration, Data, and Postwar Afterlives in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction,” Abida Younas reflects on theories of migration, postcolonialism, and critical surveillance studies to argue that Jamil Jan Kochai’s The Haunting of Hajji Hotak reconfigures surveillance through the literary motif of haunting. Abida argues that in this text, surveillance is mediated through both digital infrastructures and psychological afterlives and produces racialized and precarious subjects across transnational spaces. Forms of resistance against this surveillance are emphasized in this paper too. The predominating argument of Abida’s paper is that by narrative fragmentation, opacity, and the refusal of linear coherence, Kochai’s text challenges the epistemological and political authority of surveillance.

In his paper “Migration and Surveillance in Contemporary Global Anglophone Novels,” Shohel Rana reflects primarily on Achille Mbembe and Matthew Longo’s theories of surveillance and borderization in Necropolitics and The Politics of Border respectively, and explores how the contemporary global anglophone fiction such as Paola Mendoza and Abby Sher’s Sanctuary, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, and Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel destabilize the logics of the surveillance by emphasizing on the non-linear and heterogeneous life of the migrants. Instead of being slaves to the logics of surveillance, both the forms of the texts (e.g., magic doors in Exit West) and the resilience of the characters like Nadia and Saeed in Exit West, Vali in Sanctuary and Sara in The Dream Hotel show powerful resistance against the exclusionary politics of surveillance and borderization. Their complex life forms alongside their history of dispossession and dislocation stand against the linear and homogeneous logics of surveillance. Keeping California as a focal point of departure from such logics of surveillance, these novels ultimately envision alternative ways of life by arguing that only by creating or imagining a third space, we could stand as “we” and form an equitable and a just life. This idea of alternative worlds within a third space resonates very well with this year’s presidential theme of emancipatory narratives within crossroads.

Alongside 15 minutes of unstructured discussion, 17 minutes are reserved for each paper. The remaining time will be used by the presider to introduce the session and its speakers.