DOORS AS DIALECTICS: SPECULATIVE FUTURISM AND THE REIMAGINING OF COMMUNITY IN MOHSIN HAMID’S EXIT WEST (2017)

Abstract

This paper is a re-reading of the Exit West (2017) by Mohsin Hamid by applying the concept of speculative and critical futures studies to contend that the novel cannot be simply interpreted as a story about migration or refugee trauma but rather as a speculative diagnosis of twenty-first century global systems. Although the current literature has generally taken Exit West (2017) as a subject of analysis focusing on border studies, humanitarian discourses, and stories of affective displacement, this paper believes that these approaches have the potential to hold the novel itself within the very political imaginaries that it aims to challenge. The paper shows how Hamid builds a laboratory of narratives by speculatively predetermining the magical doors in the novel, as well as its temporal elasticity, and post-national horizon, which undergoes a stress-test on the logics of the nation-state, globalization, and mobility. The article is based on speculative futurism, critical future studies and intimacy theory and develops dual-track analysis, which looks at planetary systems and intimate transformations at the same time. It interprets the doors as the literalization of the logic of infrastructures of globalization, London as speculative projection of the conditions of mass mobility, and Marin as a provisional experiment of post-national belonging without sovereignty but in care, slowness and co-presence. The essay reveals the ways in which crisis temporality has been displaced with the speculative approach used by Hamid to present long futures, quiet continuity, and relational survival through close textual analysis. Finally, the article suggests that Exit West is based on the premise that migration is not an emergency but part of human history and future. Combining speculative estrangement with politics of intimacy allows Hamid to transcend the presentation of displacement to the theorization of community as such in the future. The novel becomes diagnostic and prophetic, calling on the readers to move beyond not just territorial boundaries, but the exhausted political imaginaries of the modern nation-state, and to start thinking new modes of belonging that are sufficient to an age of planetary flux.