Sympathetic Species: Kin and Kind in the Contemporary Global Novel

Two of the most important global crises of the current historical moment are migration and climate change, with the attendant biodiversity loss and other ecological problems. My project focuses on a corpus of recent global novels that narrate these two crises in tandem, rather than separately. These novels engage with the problem not only of refuge but of refugia, as it is understood in biological terms as a space for living organisms to survive unfavourable, species-threatening conditions. Readers are invited to think not only about which humans but which species ought to share equally in the “common possession of the surface of the earth,” to cite Kant’s formulation of universal hospitality. The problem of human exceptionalism emerges in these works as a companion to the novels’ concern with the figure of the (im)migrant or stranger. I ask what it might mean to narrate human and non-human migration together in a way that insists both on the parallels and the interspecies relationships that are involved. How might such narratives propose kinships across the boundaries of kind at a juncture when, as Donna Haraway puts it, “the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge”?