Migration Crisis and Conspiracy in Kazuo Ishiguro
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8865743 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Dominic Dean (0000-0002-6768-9944, Research and Enterprise Services, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 103 |
| Issue | 7 |
| Pages | 1116-1134 |
| Publication date | 2022-10-03 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | English Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-838X • E-ISSN: 1744-4217 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0013838x.2022.2150939 |
| OpenAlex | W4313402917 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 21 |
Migration and its crises constitute an insistent theme in Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction, where – as in real recent history – the politics of migration have a dangerously close relationship with conspiracy narratives. At the heart of such narratives lies the fetishised ideal of the organic, original home and “homeland”: conspiracist paranoia is bound up in desire for epistemological security, responding to the traumatic rifts that migrations expose in a world torn between resurgent nationalisms and fraught globalisations. This essay explores how Ishiguro’s characters register a series of psycho-cultural functions for conspiracy theory that are fundamental to modern and contemporary migration crises, their causes, and their brutal consequences. I argue that Ishiguro’s interrogation of his own protagonists’ narratives of migration alongside international crisis, in novels including A Pale View of Hills, The Remains of the Day, and When We Were Orphans, forms a subtle intervention against the power of conspiricist thought
Aesthetics · Art · Homeland · Ideal (ethics · Literature · Narrative · Paranoia · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Theme (computing · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Populism, Right-Wing Movements · Psychology · History · Law
| Citations per year | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2024 - 2025 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |