Migration Crisis and Conspiracy in Kazuo Ishiguro.pdf (1.69 MB)
Migration crisis and conspiracy in Kazuo Ishiguro
Migration and its crises constitute an insistent theme in Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction, where – as in real recent history – the politics of migration have a dangerously close relationship with conspiracy narratives. At the heart of such narratives lies the fetishised ideal of the organic, original home and “homeland”: conspiracist paranoia is bound up in desire for epistemological security, responding to the traumatic rifts that migrations expose in a world torn between resurgent nationalisms and fraught globalisations. This essay explores how Ishiguro’s characters register a series of psycho-cultural functions for conspiracy theory that are fundamental to modern and contemporary migration crises, their causes, and their brutal consequences. I argue that Ishiguro’s interrogation of his own protagonists’ narratives of migration alongside international crisis, in novels including A Pale View of Hills, The Remains of the Day, and When We Were Orphans, forms a subtle intervention against the power of conspiricist thought.
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- Published
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- Published version
Journal
English StudiesISSN
0013-838XPublisher
Informa UK LimitedExternal DOI
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7Volume
103Page range
1-19Full text available
- Yes
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2023-02-23First Open Access (FOA) Date
2023-02-23First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2023-02-23Usage metrics
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