ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at how mobility in general, and migration in particular. The ubiquity and centrality of mobility in human existence are the subjects of Olga Tokarczuk’s strange and quirky novel, Flights, which unfolds across a historical panorama in which nation-states, and their borders, play a very minor role. Forms of flight, drifting, and mobility also provide a metaphorical framework for Teju Cole’s novel, Open City, a complex transnational meditation on displacement and migration among Native Americans, the African diaspora, and Muslim refugees in New York and Brussels. Amitav Ghosh also uses migration and flight as both literal subjects and literary metaphors to explore human, cultural, and ecological mobility in his novel, The Hungry Tide. Fluidity, porousness, slippery borders, and shifting identities are all linked in Ghosh’s novel and, like Cole’s, inform the complex web of metaphors used to weave its various subjects together. The same thing can be observed in the poems contained in Sally Wen Mao’s book, Oculus.
