Global Trespassers

Sanctioned Mobility in Contemporary Culture

McLeod, John

Global Trespassers is the first critical study of cultural representations of minoritized migrant figures permitted to remain and encouraged to prosper in the Global North. In pursuing ‘good immigrant’ figures across a range of fiction, film, memoir, and monodrama since the 1990s, John McLeod exposes the suspect social and cultural dynamics that govern the admission of selected migrant or mobile lives under strict conditions. Working with the double meaning of ‘sanction’ (both permission and prohibition), Global Trespassers uncovers the mendacious, mercurial border logics that fix such figures in prefabricated identities and relations while foregrounding representations of ‘good immigrants’ who trespass outside the constraints of their concession and challenge such modes of assimilation. Examining three global domains where minoritised mobile figures are readily sanctioned – the adoptive family, the sporting arena, the world city – McLeod critically assesses the extent to which trespass makes possible the insurgent rethinking of human personhood and relationality across the ready-made lines of kinship, race, and culture, as expressed in an eclectic variety of key contemporary cultural texts by Stephen Frears, Jackie Kay, Lemn Sissay, Deann Borshay Liem, Caryl Phillips, John Lanchester, Joseph O’Neill, Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, Teju Cole, Mohsin Hamid, Tash Aw, and others.