Travel, marginality and migrant subjectivities in Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea and Caryl Phillips's The Atlantic Sound

The recent upsurge in the global circulations of post-colonial subjects recapitulates forms of mobility historically facilitated by mercantilism and colonialism. The same logic of capital accumulation that dispatched imperial agents in search of new territories appears to be at work in determining the periphery-metropole circulations of post-colonial subjects, who navigate these same routes as voluntary or forced migrants, expatriates, asylum-seekers, exiles, etc. For these mobile subjects, negotiating entry into imperial metropolises activates similar racial logic that spurred slavery and colonialism, with far-reaching implications for how the activated racial marginalisation determines relationships with host societies and among the decentred groups themselves. I explore the ideas above drawing on Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea and Caryl Phillips's The Atlantic Sound as narratives that represent long histories of cultural flows across the Indian and Atlantic oceans, with Britain as their point of both convergence and divergence. For historical reasons that are linked mainly to its extensive history of involvement in the slave trade, maritime commerce and colonisation, Britain features in these narratives as a key site for the formation and articulation of "new" diasporas and different forms of marginal subjectivities.