Utopia, Dystopia and Exilic Experience in Sunjeev Sahota's The Year of the Runaways
Main Article Content
Abstract
This paper examines the social contexts and repercussions of the experiences of Indian migrants in England as portrayed in Sunjeev Sahota's The Year of the Runaways. Although narratives of migration is attached to the very genesis of human existence on planet earth, but the experience of human mobility has in recent history taken an unimaginably traumatising dimension and this has continued to draw the attention of creative writers and literary scholars. From the analysis of the text named above, this unprecedented trend in migration experience is fuelled by the apparent inequality in the world in which a greater percentage of nations of the world, especially in the developing countries, continue, in the midst of plenty, to wallow in abject poverty, underdevelopment and poor governance that make the mass of the underprivileged humanity that populate these disadvantaged realms to continue to exist in their varied states of disillusionment and vulnerable to diverse dangers and indignities in their quests for bare survival. Failed leadership in most of the Third World nations and societies occasioned by greed and leadership ineptitude, corruption, nepotism, bigotry, chauvinism, superciliousness, and extremism constitute the bases for the abysmal socio- economic and political performance of these nations with the concomitant human mobility that result in avoidable suffering of the weak and disadvantaged of the world. The paper explores the socio- olitical trajectories of migration narratives and migrant encounters where dreams of utopia confront the reality of dystopia as projected in Sahota's The Year of the Runaways
Downloads
Article Details
Issue
Section
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
All materials deposited in the Afrischolar Discovery Repository are made openly available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), unless otherwise indicated.
Under this license, users are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, including commercial use
These freedoms are granted provided that appropriate credit is given to the original author(s), a link to the license is included, and any changes made are clearly indicated. Attribution must not suggest endorsement by the author(s) or the repository.
Authors retain full copyright of their work while granting Afrischolar Discovery Repository a non-exclusive license to store, preserve, and disseminate the content for academic and public use.
Users must not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from exercising the rights permitted by the license.
Where third-party content is included, users are responsible for ensuring compliance with the applicable licensing terms for such materials.
By submitting content to the Afrischolar Discovery Repository, contributors affirm that they have the right to distribute their work under the CC BY 4.0 license.
For full license details, visit: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
How to Cite
References
Alexander, Claire. “Rivers to Cross: Exile and Transformation in the Caribbean migration Novels of George Lamming”.Writing Across Worlds: Literature and Migration. Russell King, John Connell, and Paul White Eds. London: Routledge, 1995. Bullock, Marcus. “Afterword: the Dialectics of identity”. Aftermaths: Exile, Migration, and Diaspora Reconsidered. Marcus Bullock and Peter Paik Eds. London: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Cassola, Arnold. “Migration in Contemporary Maltese Fiction”. Writing Across Worlds: Literature and Migration. Russell King, John Connell, and Paul White Eds. London: Routledge, 1995. Crew, Jan. 1976.“The Caribbean Writer and Exile”.Journal of Black Study, 1976, Vol.8, No.4. Dustmann, Christian and Weiss, Yoran. “Return Migration: Theory and Empiric Evidence from the UK”. British Journal of Industrial Relations. London: Blackwell, 2007, pp 236-256. Harrison, Paul. Inside the Third World: The Anatomy of Poverty. London: Penguin Group, 1993. Hassan, Ihab. “Coming to the Antipodes – Migrancy, Travel, Homecoming”. Aftermaths: exile, Migration, and Diaspora Reconsidered. Marcus Bullock and Peter Paik Eds. London: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Hibbins, Raymond and Pease, Bob. “Men and Masculinities on the Move”. Migrant Men: Critical Studies of Masculinities and the Migrant Experience. Mike Donaldson, Raymond Hibbins, Richard Howson and Bob Pease Eds. New York: Routledge, 2009. Kehinde, Ayo. “Memories of Exile and Negotiations of New Spaces in SegunAfolabi'sA Life Elsewhere”. Ibadan Journal of English Studies, 2008, Vol.4 &5: pp 148-171. McCarthy, Conor. Criticism, Exile, Ireland. Aftermaths: Exile, Migration, and Diaspora. Marcus Bullock and Peter Paik. Eds. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticisms. London: Granta Books, 1991. Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and other Essays. New York: Granta Books, 2000. Sahota, Sunjeev. The Year of the Runaways. New Delhi: Pan Macmillan India, 2015. Utopia, Dystopia and Exilic Experience in Sunjeev Sahota's The Year of the Runaways Samardziya, Zoran. “The Great Migration Elsewhere”. Aftermaths: Exile, Migration, and Diaspora Reconsidered. Marcus Bullock and Peter Paik Eds. London: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Savin,Ada. Migration and Exile: Charting New Literary and Artistic Territories. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. Zeleza, Paul. “The Politics and Poetics of Exile: Edward Said in Africa”. Research in African Literature, 2005,Vol.36, No.3. Indiana: Indiana University Press. Internet Sources rd https//www.etymonline.com. Retrieved on 23 February, 2021. rd https// ww.britannica.com. Retrieved on 23 February, 2021.