Imagining Utopia through Communities in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West

Mohsin Hamid’s novel, Exit West (2017) takes place in a world where magical doorways allow refugees passage between countries. Following the couple Saeed and Nadia – refugees from an unnamed city undergoing fundamentalist insurrection – the novel explores their grappling amid different political tensions. While commentators have discussed the way Hamid re-frames migration as form of connectivity, and the portals as utopian forms of escape, this article investigates the economic specificities of such connectivity, through three near-future communities that Hamid imagines for Nadia and Saeed: a Kensington townhouse reclaimed by refugees, the “London Halo” work-for-housing program, and the shanty city of Marin, San Francisco. These collectives defy the logic of capitalist realism (Fisher). In this way, utopian potential exists within the novel both in terms of magical thinking against the system (Adorno) and as embodied forms of solidarity amid crisis (Žižek and Jameson).