“The skin that keeps the law in place”

Abstract This chapter explores how contemporary migration novels such as Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and China Miéville’s The City & The City deploy formal disorientation to challenge dominant affective and political frameworks surrounding migration and the securitized logics of the nation-state. It argues that both novels foreground the imaginative labor required to construct, maintain, and enforce borders, showing that borders are not merely physical demarcations but narrative, affective, and epistemological structures that must be constantly upheld through perception, belief, and repetition. By deploying formal techniques of disorientation – abrupt temporal shifts, allegorical world-making, and epistemological ambiguity – the novels resist liberal models of empathy and sentimental identification, instead unsettling readers’ affective orientation and ethical expectations. Through this lens, the chapter engages debates in refugee and human rights studies, critiques of empathy, and speculative fiction, offering a theory of disorientation as an ethical and political mode. It concludes that such disorientation may open imaginative space for rethinking relationality, collectivity, and the limits of the liberal humanitarian frame.