1. Both The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil and Exit West construct plots that dissolve the normative assumptions that naturalize borders and rule through borders. How do you understand the arc of plot in each story with respect to fixed borders?? What is achieved by representing border crossing and its consequences in each work? Does one story more persuasively or convincingly destabilize the normative concepts of the state?
3. What does the study of exile and belonging demand one consider about memory and its representation? How do exiles and refugees and migrants teach us about memory? Be sure to offer examples of how at least three individual authors have portrayed memory in their experience of being dislocated.
Three sources:
heading somewhere By djamilai brahim
Viet Thanh Nguyen, ed., The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives
Joyce: A Little Cloud
Your answers should be 500 -600 words in length, a total of 1000-1200 words.
Be sure to identify at the beginning of your answer the texts from the syllabus that you will address.