Contested political alliances in fortress Europe: migrants and Europeans in Helon Habila’s Travellers

Abstract

Helon Habila’s Travellers was written as a response to the refugee crisis in 2015, and it narrates loosely connected stories of African asylum seekers precariously travelling in Southern and Western European countries seeking shelter. This article discusses the novel’s representation of Europeans and migrants acting together by drawing from Jacques Rancière’s theorization of dissensus as a tool to challenge existing political hierarchies by creating new solidarities against present orders. I maintain that the novel manages to problematize the mainstream media images of immigration issues, as well as other such narrative tropes that reinforce the understanding of immigrants as Europe’s others. I argue that the novel instead exposes facets of structural violence in fortress Europe as it violently suppresses immigrant voices. Along these lines, the novel is further discussed as a representative of critical art or dissensual art that not only exposes contemporary exclusionary politics, but also advances a new affective politics by actively demonstrating more democratic ways of including people without a political voice. It can thus help to reconfigure which political questions are included in public deliberations in the future and provoke new, more democratic ways of seeing immigration issues.