Postcolonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law

Postcolonialism across the Disciplines

by David Farrier

Postcolonial Asylum is concerned with asylum as a key emerging postcolonial field. Through an engagement with asylum legislation, legal theory and ethics, David Farrier argues that the exclusionary culture of host nations casts asylum seekers as contemporary incarnations of the infrahuman object of colonial sovereignty. Postcolonial Asylum includes readings of the work of asylum seeker and postcolonial authors and filmmakers, including J.M. Coetzee, Caryl Phillips, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Leila Aboulela, Stephen Frears, Pawel Pawlikowski and Michael Winterbottom. These readings are framed by the work of postcolonial theorists (Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul Gilroy, Achille Mbembe), as well as other influential thinkers (Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière, Emmanuel Levinas, Étienne Balibar, Zygmunt Bauman), in order to institute what Spivak calls a 'step beyond' postcolonial studies; one that carries with it the insights and limitations of the discipline
as it looks to new ways for postcolonial studies to engage with the world.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 2011

About the author

David Farrier teaches at the University of Edinburgh. In 2017, Footprints won the Royal Society of Literature's Giles St Aubyn Award for Non-Fiction. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.