The More-Than-Human Refugee Journey: Hassan Blasim's Short Stories

This article addresses the representation of forced and clandestine migration in some of Hassan Blasim’s short stories within an interdisciplinary conceptual framework that brings together theories of biopolitics, ecocriticism, human rights discourse, heterotopia, and the aesthetics of “nightmare realism”. Blasim’s short stories offer new opportunities to address territoriality, life and truth at their limits in real and imagined sites where forest and border, human and non-human meet to suggest more-than-human futures for the paradoxical project of reclaiming human rights. By analysing Blasim’s unique representational techniques, through which he mediates material and discursive violence within a combined biopolitical-ecological framework, the article also investigates the potentials and limitations of a more ecologically attuned perspective on freedom of movement and community, based on the claims of the environment rather than the nation