Hostile Households

Deportability and Reproductive Geography in Brown’s Assembly and Varvello’s "Brexit Blues"

Abstract

This paper argues that Comparative Studies adequately show how literature can serve as an original resource for animating interdisciplinary geopolitical debates, contributing in important ways to other disciplines (in this case, social and political theory) and the theories used to analyse them. It does so by focusing on the comparative analysis of two works of fiction that deal with the intimate repercussions of the UK’s hostile environment rhetoric and policies on transnational couples, showing how they challenge and complicate Bridget Anderson’s concept of “community of value” (2013) and add significant elements to Sara Ahmed’s theory of The Cultural Politics of Emotions (2014). Through a comparative approach to the discussion on how deportability impinges upon intimacy and romantic relationships, I consider Marco Varvello’s short-story “Brexit Blues” (2018) and Natasha Brown’s novel Assembly (2021) as “scale-bending” (Smith 2004) literary projects that highlight the scalar slide between household and nation to reveal the intertwinings of migration and reproductive politics in today’s “climatic context of anti-blackness” (Gedalof 2022) and immigration eugenics (D’Aoust 2022).