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Fragile Inquiry in Borderlands: Embodied Gestures and Democratic Persistence in Laila Lalami's Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits
Abstract
Migration scholarship has shown how sovereignty creates zones of disposability and suspended life. By focusing on exposure, it has overlooked minor, improvised gestures through which migrants recompose political life under abandonment. This chapter responds to that gap by introducing fragile inquiry, defined as gestures through which migrants enact world-making. It makes three contributions to migration studies: (1) it theorizes hope as gestural practice rather than sentiment or strategy; (2) it develops a method of close gestural reading paired with narrative cartography; and (3) it reconceives migration as democratic experimentation under ruin. Drawing on Dewey, Rorty and Addams, it treats Laila Lalami's Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits as a literary archive of life-sustaining micro-practices. Detailed readings, from Murad's shoreline maps to Faten's “maybes” and Halima's theft accusation, reveal hope as active world-making. Fragile inquiry challenges necropolitical paradigms and points toward policies that nurture migrant-led improvisations for democratic persistence.
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