Deterritorialised diaspora: a literary testimony of uprooted migrants in The Boat People

Abstract

The Global South has long been at the epicentre of forced migration and structural violence. Literary narratives emerging from these contexts challenge dominant Northern discourses by articulating the lived experiences of deterritorialisation. This article addresses the theoretical lacuna of forced displacement in the Global South. Sharon Bala’s The Boat People emerges as a defining literary response to the forced displacement of Sri Lankan Tamil refugees across militarised borders and into the detention apparatus of the Canadian state. The close textual analysis of the novel reveals that Sri Lankan Tamil refugee experience is constituted not through cultural negotiation and hybridity but through systematic, layered forced deterritorialisation that dismantles both geography and culture. Extending Deleuze and Guattari’s deterritorialisation into the postcolonial context with reference to Nail’s ‘kinopolitics’, the article examines how the border regime of the Global North exercises sovereign power over displaced Global South refugees through detention, legal categorisation, and juridical suspension. The objective is to identify multiple axes of deterritorialisation and precarious reterritorialized spaces within the deterritorialised diaspora. The article argues that Tamil refugee marginalisation within diaspora discourse is epistemically produced and calls for a decolonised diaspora theory that recognises forced displacement as constitutive of the global mobility regime.