In the contemporary geopolitical landscape, the figure of the migrant has become the central anxiety of the nation-state. With the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reporting that over 110 million people are currently forcibly displaced worldwide (UNHCR 2023), we are witnessing a crisis of movement that destabilizes the traditional Westphalian order of fixed borders and static citizenship. However, parallel to this humanitarian crisis is a crisis of representation within literary studies. For decades, the scholarly approach to migration literature has been caught in a binary trap between sociological documentation and liberal humanism. On one hand, texts are read as ethnographic evidence—testimony to the failure of the postcolonial state or the brutality of the border regime (Goyal 2019). On the other, they are read through the lens of sentimentalism, serving as vehicles for generating empathy in the Western reader (Carpio 2023). This latter mode, often praised in book clubs and mainstream reviews, relies on a humanizing project that paradoxically reinforces the very hierarchies it seeks to dismantle. By asking the reader to ‘feel for’ the migrant, these narratives often reduce the displaced subject to a victim of circumstance, an object of pity whose humanity is conditional on their suffering being legible to a settled audience (Carpio 2023: 13). In this review essay, I discuss two recent monographs, Kevin Potter’s Poetics of the Migrant: Migrant Literature and the Politics of Motion (2023) and Glenda R. Carpio’s Migrant Aesthetics: Contemporary Fiction, Global Migration, and the Limits of Empathy (2023) on the issue of narrativizing the experience of 21st century migration. I review the ‘poetics’ and ‘aesthetics’ of contemporary migration literature as studied and theorised by Kevin Potter and Glenda Carpio in their monographs. Both authors contend that to truly grasp the contemporary condition of displacement, we must dismantle our sedentarist assumptions and reject the commodification of empathy. They propose a new vocabulary for the 21st century that moves beyond the immigrant narrative of assimilation and loss, towards a radical analysis of how bodies move through space and how text moves through the world. This critical impasse stems from what scholars have termed ‘sedentarist metaphysics’ (Potter 2023: 21) which refers to an ontological paradigm that assumes the moral and logical primacy of fixed space, the home, and the nation-state. Within this framework, movement is treated as an aberration, a pathology, or a temporary tragedy to be resolved by settlement. But what if movement is not the exception, but the rule? What if the migrant is not a marginal figure, but the primary constitutive force of social history? And what if the reader’s desire for empathy is not a moral virtue, but a consumerist vice? The two texts pose these questions and propose perspectives of migration through the craft of migrant literature (poetics) and the consumption of migrant literature (via aesthetics).

While both Potter and Carpio share a commitment to a movement-oriented critique, their methodologies diverge in productive ways and effectively map the two poles of new migration studies: the ontological and the ethical. Kevin Potter’s Poetics of the Migrant operates as a philosophical intervention as the first two chapters of his book seek to reposition the history of poetics in reference to migration. Beginning from Aristotle, Potter offers a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the understanding of the term ‘poetics’ and ultimately defines it in two interconnected levels: ‘the formal and linguistic qualities of a text’ and ‘the broader systems of meaning that order cultural knowledge’ (2023: 46). In simpler words, poetics is ‘the deliberate manner in which meaning, information, and knowledge is arranged, structured, and delivered’ (45). Potter draws on Thomas Nail’s concept of kinopolitics—the theory and counter-history of social motion that challenges the assumption of societies as primarily static, spatial, or temporal, and understands them primarily as ‘regimes of motion’ (24) to develop the concept of kinopoetics that centres the migrant as the primary driver of history. For Potter, the political in literature is not found in the message of the text, but in its motion. In this view, the migrant is not a passive victim of the state, but an active, ‘pedetic’ force (a chaotic, stepping motion) that reshapes the social assemblage (56–57).

Conversely, Glenda R. Carpio’s Migrant Aesthetics operates as an ethical and formalist intervention. Her target is the consumption of the text. She challenges the ‘empathy mode’ of reading, which she argues serves as a ‘comforting myth’ that absolves the reader of guilt (2023: 235). Throughout her analysis, Carpio questions the legal genealogy of the word ‘immigrant’ and strategically employs the term ‘migrant’, to encompass a broader spectrum of experiences involving ‘displacement and movement’ (15), thereby resisting the traditional, often narrow, constraints of ‘immigrant literature’ as a default category. Her theoretical framework, ‘migrant aesthetics’, refers to formal strategies adopted by contemporary authors (Teju Cole, Dinaw Mengestu, Aleksandar Hemon and others) who are aware of this empathy-centred model and consciously reject it in pursuit of truthfulness (9). These authors, according to Carpio, use literary techniques such as ‘strategic anonymity, choral or collective narration, and shifting vantage points’ (21), that are designed to foreclose emotional consumption and invite readers to inhabit ‘positions, not persons’ (21). Carpio posits that the political power of literature lies in its ability to withhold. The methodology of the book is inspired by Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘representative thinking’, which compels readers to “think, as themselves, from the position of another person” (34). The book develops this theory across each chapter through close readings of texts by authors conscious of migration’s commodification. Carpio insists that formal innovation and political critique are ‘intricately intertwined’ for these writers, whose work is situated against the expansive backdrop of European colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade, and global neocolonialism (57). Where Potter argues that the migrant creates the world through movement, Carpio argues that the migrant text must prevent the reader from consuming that world as entertainment. Together, these works offer a complementary analysis of migrant literature: Potter provides the internal logic of the migrant’s world-making (how they move), and Carpio provides the external logic of reception (how they are read).

Furthermore, to understand how these diverging theoretical frameworks operate on the same object of study, we can look to the work of Teju Cole, specifically his novel Open City (2011), which serves as a central case study in both monographs. The novel features a Nigerian-German psychiatrist, Julius, who wanders the streets of New York, engaging in a fluid, intellectual drifting that defies the expectation of the tragic immigrant narrative. For Potter, Open City is the exemplar of ‘wandering kinopoetics’ (Potter 2023: 231). He focuses on the physical act of Julius’s walking. In Potter’s analysis, walking is more than a means of transit; it is a form of ‘enunciation that rewrites the urban landscape’ (228), much like what the 20^th-century Situationists would say. The city is designed by ‘divisive architectures of power’ such as grids, walls, and surveillance systems meant to control flow (228). Potter classifies Julius as a ‘vagabond’, a kinopolitical figure who utilizes ‘free wandering as a form of pedetic force’ to navigate the regulatory systems of the modern city (235). He argues that Julius’s movement is a rebellious act that ‘deterritorializes’ neoliberal urbanism and the privatization of space, as an act of counter-mapping (235). He connects the site of the World Trade Centre to American grief and also to the global histories of violence and trade. For Potter, the significance of the text is ontological: Julius’s movement is the meaning. He is not ‘lost’; he is actively producing a new spatial reality that rebels against the ‘micro-politics of suspicion’ imposed by the state (258).

Meanwhile, for Carpio, the significance of Open City lies in what Julius refuses to do. She views the novel through the lens of strategic anonymity and opacity. Carpio describes Julius as an ‘enigma of an illuminated shadow’ (53), a narrator who simulates the intimacy of a diary but selectively ‘withholds access to [his] past and consciousness’ (53–54). Julius is a narrator who reveals everything about his intellectual life (art, music, history) but almost nothing about his interior emotional self or his past (Carpio 2023: 92–94). He refuses to perform the trauma that the Western marketplace demands of the African writer. Carpio argues that this opacity is a formal weapon that blocks the reader’s desire to know, pity, or master the migrant subject. Carpio argues that this ‘strategic anonymity’ is a ruse designed by Cole to redirect the reader’s attention away from a singular immigrant success story and toward the ‘global history of forced migration and dispossession’ (71). Carpio draws on the psychiatric figure of the ‘fugueur—a traumatized, compulsive walker whose journey was “less a voyage of self-discovery than an attempt to eliminate self”’ (2023: 54). She interprets the novel’s structure as a palimpsest, where Julius reads the city as an ‘interconnected web of events’ linking contemporary Manhattan to the ‘Atlantic slave trade’ and the ‘Great Dying of Native Americans’ (26). For Carpio, the shocking revelation of a past rape at the novel’s end serves as a ‘slap’ to the reader, breaking the ‘twinned solitude’ shared with the narrator and exposing the limits of ‘literary cosmopolitanism’, which ‘insistently denies its readers the illusion that imaginative transports can stand in for real global change’ (74).

Through the comparative readings of Open City in the two monographs, we can appreciate the two critical positions the authors take on migration literature. While Potter primarily looks at how the character moves through the world, inventing ‘the social system through which [he] passes’ (2023: 68), Carpio illuminates how the text positions the reader against that world, providing a disciplined perspective of ‘facing reality’ that refuses to offer ‘emotive transport’, and enforcing a reckoning with a world ‘forever bloodied by persecution’ (2023: 121).

At a broader level, Potter’s argument in Poetics of the Migrant is to rescue the migrant from the subaltern status assigned by traditional Postcolonial Studies. He critiques the field’s ‘Holy Trinity’—Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha—arguing that their theories often remain trapped in a sedentarist logic that defines the migrant by ‘lack (lack of home, lack of power, lack of speech)’ (2023: 115–16). Instead, Potter proposes an ‘ontology of motion’ (138) where he organizes his study through a taxonomy of motion, dedicating chapters into three distinct figures that disrupt static order: the Nomad, the Vagabond, and the Barbarian. His analysis of the Nomad focuses on ‘Destructive Kinopoetics” (147–221) and the genre of Magic Realism. Through a reading of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices (1997), Potter shows that magic in migration literature enacts a process of overcoming ‘the constraints of modernity by imagining a reality that coincides with and, in some senses, modifies the present’ (218). In Exit West, characters step through black doors to instantly transport from war zones to Western cities. Potter argues these doors are not mere plot devices but are ‘manifestations of nomadic desire’ (218). The migrant’s will to move is so potent that it tears holes in the metaphysics of the nation-state and magic asserts that the migrant’s right to movement supersedes the state’s right to borders. This is a destructive kinopoetics because it annihilates the sedentarist concept of distance and border control.

Moving from the global to the urban, Potter introduces the Vagabond and ‘Wandering Kinopoetics’ (222–287). Focusing on Open City (2011) and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), he illustrates how the migrant body in the city is a site of surveillance. The state attempts to enforce a ‘regimen of perfection’ (257)—a demand for the migrant to be visible, documented, and productive—and in response, the vagabond rebels through aimless and pedetic movement. Walking without destination is a glitch in the capitalist, surveillance algorithm. Potter argues that ‘the vagabond’s kinopoetics creates and produces the experience of suspicion on their own terms’, transforming the stigma of being out of place’ into a mode of rewriting the city (260).

In the last chapter of his book, Potter addresses the Barbarian through ‘Stuttering Kinopoetics’ (287–337). He identifies the barbarian as a migrant figure historically defined by a perceived ‘natural incapacity for proper speech and reason’ (298). Potter posits this ‘babbling’ as ‘creative stuttering’, and he describes it as a ‘mad production of speeds and intervals’ that puts the dominant language in ‘perpetual disequilibrium’ (298–300). Standard English is the language of the empire and the sedentarist state and it demands clarity, standard grammar, and ‘proper’ enunciation (290). Potter responds to the imposition of standardised English through the poetry of John Agard and Linton Kwesi Johnson, arguing that the creative use of non-standard language acts as a radical political revolt against imperial mastery (289–293). Potter demonstrates this by a close reading of Agard’s poem, ‘Listen Mr Oxford Don’, to highlight a linguistic ‘revolt’ where the speaker asserts, ‘mugging de Queen’s English / Is story of my life’ (313). Potter argues that such stuttering is a form of ‘self-defence’ against the ‘jail sentence’ of standard grammar, making the language neither ‘the property of the Queen’, nor something that can lay claim to ‘the speaker’s life’ (314).

Potter’s contribution to Migrant Studies is a radical empowerment of the migrant figure. He moves the conversation from ‘the right to have rights’ (a legal framework) to the ‘power to move’ (an ontological framework). Potter focuses on the philosophy of movement, whereas Glenda R. Carpio, in Migrant Aesthetics, focuses on the ethics of reading. On the whole, Migrant Aesthetics is a blistering critique of the ‘empathy industrial complex’, which as Carpio argues, reflects the neoliberal condition where reading about suffering has become a substitute for political action (2023: 21). The reader pities the migrant, experiences a cathartic release of emotion, and then returns to their life, feeling morally absolved. Carpio advocates for a shift from empathy to Arendt’s concept of ‘representative thinking’ because empathy collapses the distance between self and other (‘I feel what you feel’), which is both impossible and disrespectful (233–235). Representative thinking, however, requires imagination without identification (‘I think for myself from your position, while acknowledging I am not you’) (235). To enforce this distance, Carpio articulates a ‘migrant aesthetic’ characterized by formal difficulty and alienation. She begins with Anonymity in Chapter One where she analyses Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names (2014) alongside Cole’s Open City, and explores how characters who refuse to be named or refuse to share their trauma disrupt the “native informant” trope (33–67). In All Our Names, Mengestu’s protagonist Isaac remains strategically opaque, forcing the reader to confront their own sense of entitlement to the migrant’s biography. Carpio then moves to ‘Refraction and Anti-autobiography’ in Chapter Two, where she examines Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (2008). Hemon, a Bosnian writer, interweaves his own story with the historical true-crime story of Lazarus Averbuch, a Jewish immigrant killed by the Chicago police in 1908. Carpio argues that this ‘refraction’ creates a solidarity of position over personality and links the Islamophobia of the post-9/11 era, as experienced by Hemon, with the anti-Semitism of the early 20th century (92). This technique allows the reader to see migration as a cyclical, historical phenomenon driven by state xenophobia. In Chapter Three, Carpio examines Valeria Luiselli’s migrant aesthetics in two novels: Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (2017) and Lost Children Archive (2019). She interrogates the language of immigrant bureaucracy and points to the ‘echoes (historical, literary, mythical)’ of border crises in the ‘long, cruel history of Native American genocide and New World dispossession’ (95–104). In Chapter Five, Carpio addresses ‘Toxicity’ in the work of Junot Díaz (221–237). She connects the ‘micro-violence’ of toxic masculinity in the diaspora to the ‘macro-violence’of colonialism and environmental apocalypse (225).

Carpio’s most poignant analysis concerns ‘Carceral Migration’, the condition of indefinite detention, in Chapters Four and Six. Carpio examines Julie Otsuka’s use of ‘choral narration’, or writing in the first-person plural (155), in The Buddha in the Attic (2011). There is no single protagonist to anchor the narrative; instead, the text foregrounds the collective experience of Japanese ‘picture brides’ (149)—immigrant women who married Japanese men in the United States, knowing them only through photographs and letters, often fabricated or written by others—and who later had to face internment. In addition to being a form that maintains the boundaries between reader and subject ‘so that we can focus our attention on truth, not emotion’ (156), Carpio argues that the novel’s choral voice thwarts the individualism that underpins the empathy model because readers cannot identify with a single hero and instead find themselves immersed in the structural condition of the group.

Read together, Poetics of the Migrant and Migrant Aesthetics (2023) dismantle the sedentarist and humanitarian frameworks that have long constrained migration studies, while the latter critiques the limits of empathy implicated in the reception of migrant literature. Both monographs offer complimentary perspectives on poetics and aesthetics for thinking about narratives of displacement in the 21st century. Potter’s work conceptually reorients the position of the migrant figure through kinopoetics, in which the migrant becomes a kinetic cultural object that rewrites the map and operates as a deterritorialising function in the world. Carpio’s readings show how strategic opacity and choral narration of migrant literature do not reduce migrants to objects of pity, but instead orient readers to think analytically about the global forces of empire and capitalism. At a time when political rhetoric increasingly weaponizes borders and dehumanizes those who cross them, both books demand that literary criticism do more than observe from the safety of the shore. They call for a poetics that moves and an aesthetic that implicates.