ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the diasporic and migrant trajectories of the protagonists in Home Fire (HF) and Exit West represent and mediate the contemporary global discourse on insecurity and precarity. In both novels, the conditions of insecurity and precarity emerge due to false perceptions of an idealised version of the nation’s past based on nativity and racialisation, and the failure to imagine multiple modalities of being and belonging. A brief study of the etymological journey and the semantic politics of insecurity suggests that the diverse contexts in which it has emerged, and has been deployed as a strategy, have political, social, economic, cultural and personal ramifications. The chapter outlines in detail how the discourses on insecurity and precarity are delineated through the sonic subtext in HF. Transgredience is the necessary touch the self establishes with its alterity and its own multiple self-understandings.
