The Refusal of Arrival: Structural Mobility and Dialogic Autoethnography with Flights

Abstract

This article examines transnational mobility as a condition of structural fragmentation through an autoethnographic dialogue with Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights. Drawing on lived relocation between England and China, it explores how movement reorganises time, identity and embodiment through documentation, medical scrutiny and institutional verification. The article introduces the concept of “bureaucratic anatomisation” to describe how mobile subjects are divided into documents, data and bodily evidence. Rather than treating arrival as resolution, it considers relocation, ageing and impending parenthood as overlapping forms of unfinished transition. In doing so, it demonstrates how sustained literary encounter can function as an analytic method within creative and autoethnographic research.