Deterritorialized Lives | Migration, Identity, and the Politics of Space in Contemporary Fiction

Deterritorialized Lives offers an incisive exploration of how contemporary fiction articulates the psychic and political dislocations of migration in an era defined by exile, border regimes, and fractured sovereignties. Through compelling readings of Brian Chikwava’s Harare North and Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand, İsmail Kaygısız examines how deterritorialization emerges not only as a lived condition but as an aesthetic logic embedded within narrative form.

Engaging with the theoretical interventions of Deleuze and Guattari, Appadurai, Mbembe, the book traces the uneven textures of migrant subjectivity across postcolonial and geopolitical contexts. In its contrapuntal analysis of two divergent protagonists—a former agent of state violence entangled in ideology, and a young refugee navigating trauma and survival—it reveals the intricate interplay of memory, identity, and displacement.

Elegantly written and intellectually ambitious, Deterritorialized Lives speaks to scholars of literature, migration, and critical theory, offering a powerful meditation on rupture, mobility, and the imaginative force of fiction.