The ontogenesis of fear in Héctor Tobar's The Barbarian Nurseries

This chapter examines the role that fear plays in constructing the concept of migrant “illegality,” particularly as it appears in Héctor Tobar's 2011 novel The Barbarian Nurseries. Using Brian Massumi's concept of the ontogenesis—the transtemporal and seemingly agentless snowballing—of fear, I suggest that fear structures relationships between American families and undocumented migrant workers in the novel, as well as the novel itself. I provide a narratological reading of the text and suggest that by emplotting fear at the level of theme and form, Tobar offers both a representation of and riposte to the heavily mediatized propagation of fear around migrant “illegality.”