Degree Name
Master of Arts
Graduate Program
English
Advisor
Boulukos, George
Abstract
Contemporary socio-political discourses on global migration often risk misrepresenting migrant experiences by framing them mainly through the language of humanitarianism, inclusion, and identity. While these frameworks foreground protection and belonging, they may inadvertently obscure the institutional and political structures that regulate, differentiate, and expose migrants to uneven forms of precarity. In this paper, therefore, I examine Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Dream Count to explore the migrant condition as one shaped by migrants’ everyday encounters with space, law, labor, and political belonging. By so doing, I argue that the novel reveals migrant vulnerability not just as the consequence of singular acts of discrimination or socio-cultural violence, but as the outcome of calculated systemic processes of exposure, neglect, and disposal, symptomatic of modern biopower. As such, this paper focuses on the character of Kadiatou and turns to biopolitical and human rights theories of Achille Mbembe, Giorgio Agamben, Orlando Patterson, and Hannah Arendt to demonstrate that migration should not be understood simply as movement from crisis to safety, but as a transition that also engenders differently configured forms of expendability. By bringing migrant literature, human rights, and biopolitics into dialogue, I unveil how some migrant lives are managed, classified, and differentially valued through institutional practices that delimit their access to protection, rights, and political recognition.