Global Trespassers: Sanctioned Mobility in Contemporary Culture

Ebook available to libraries exclusively as part of the JSTOR Path to Open initiative.

Global Trespassers is the first critical study of cultural representations of minoritised migrant figures permitted to remain and encouraged to prosper in the Global North. In pursuing such ’good immigrant’ figures across a range of fiction, film, memoir, and monodrama since the 1990s, John McLeod exposes the suspect social and cultural dynamics which govern the admission of selected migrant or mobile lives under strict conditions. Working with the double meaning of ’sanction’ as a means of both permission and prohibition, Global Trespassers uncovers the mendacious and mercurial border-logics which fix such figures in prefabricated identities and relations while foregrounding representations of ’good immigrants’ who seek to trespass beyond the constraints of their concession and challenge such modes of assimilation. With reference to three global domains where minoritised mobile figures are readily sanctioned - the adoptive family, the sporting arena, the world city - McLeod critically assesses the extent to which trespassing makes possible the insurgent rethinking of human personhood and relationality across the ready-made lines of kinship, race, and culture, as expressed the work of an eclectic variety of key contemporary cultural texts by Jackie Kay, Lemn Sissay, Deann Borshay Liem, Caryl Phillips, John Lanchester, Teju Cole, Tash Aw, and more besides

John McLeod is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures, School of English, University of Leeds, UK