The EU-funded NARFIB project, The Novel and the Refugee: Contemporary Global Fiction and the Imaginary of Border Regimes (NARFIB), has investigated the rise of ‘global border novel’, as a cultural product that coincides with the acute mass displacement around the globe. As of May 2022, there were an unprecedented one hundred million refugees globally, exceeding the previous year’s statistics by an alarming 10 million. The main objective of NARFIB has been to articulate the relationality between the increasingly harsh border regimes for refugees and the contemporary global novel. In order to capture the valence of the border, not only as a deterring physical construct, but as a productive cultural, technological, cognitive and aesthetic formation with its own mobile and diverse permutations, NARFIB has drawn on the state-of-the-art debates in border studies, literary studies, surveillance studies and political psychology. As one of its original contributions, NARFIB has transcended these existing disciplinary approaches to develop a method of analysing border in literature that can be translated not only to literary studies but in fields such as cultural studies, media studies and political science. This research action has had the following specific objectives: 1) to develop a transdisciplinary methodology for reading the contemporary fiction that considers the relationality between border politics and the global contemporary novel, 2) to identify a new trend in contemporary global fiction and articulate its position as a cultural product in terms of state surveillance and political psychology of citizenship, and 3) to articulate a ‘grammar’ of border imaginary in response to the logics of containment, encampment, carcerality for refugees and ordinary citizens.
