John McLeod: Sanctioned Migration and the Figure of the Trespasser (Forum) | 13 Nov 2024

Wednesday, 13 November 2024, 6-8 PM

Room IG 311

This lecture is part of the Forum of Global Anglophone Literatures and Cultures

For minoritised persons allowed to move across territories or given leave to remain, human mobility is usually “sanctioned” in the double sense of this term: permitted and penalised. Sanctioned travellers (and their locally born descendants) are usually required to take up certain positions, betray particular behaviours, and subscribe to specific values if they are to live unmolested as legitimated citizens. Yet their existence remains ever shadowed by the spectre of prejudice and the threat of expulsion. In this presentation, I consider the literary and cultural representation of seemingly fortunate travellers who threaten to break the terms of their sanctioning and pursue relations out of bounds — an activity I conceptualise in terms of trespass. How might the critical agency of trespass — as both a wandering and a wondering — challenge the prevailing gatekeeping of transpersonal relations? By explore some select examples from contemporary Anglophone writers, I consider if trespass engenders significant dissident traction in twenty-first-century representations of human mobility.

John McLeod is Professor of Postcolonial and Diaspora Literatures at the University of Leeds, UK. He is the author of Global Trespassers: Sanctioned Mobility in Contemporary Culture (LUP, 2024), Life Lines: Writing Transcultural Adoption (Bloomsbury, 2015), Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (Routledge, 2004), and Beginning Postcolonialism (MUP, 2000), as well as co-editor of the Ohio State University Press book series, Formations: Adoption, Kinship, and Culture.