Inverting the Coordinates: Place, Dystopia and Utopia in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

Abstract: In Exit West (2017), Mohsin Hamid introduces a fantastic element—black doors that instantaneously transport anyone crossing their threshold to other places on the planet— which disrupts the time/space relations of a fictional world otherwise akin to our own. In doing so, the novel undermines the role of geopolitical borders, questions normative understandings of migration and the refugee, and, perhaps most importantly, shifts the novel’s operating chronotope from a dystopian trajectory to a utopian one. Prompted by Hamid’s demonstrated sensitivity to the role of place and movement in the life of the embodied subject, I approach Exit West with a gaze centered on markers of space and time in order to explore its entanglement of violence, hope, space, time, utopia, dystopia, and the apocalyptic. Ultimately, the novel represents a defense of fiction’s latent potential to enact radical change through a return to the utopian imagination.