Exclusion, bureaucracy and racialized migration in abdulrazak gurnah’s by the sea

Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea (2002) interrogates the paradoxes of hospitality within the asylum process, revealing how conditional welcome operates as a mechanism of control rather than care. Through a critical engagement with Jacques Derrida's hostipitality and Achille Mbembe's necropolitics, this article examines the protagonist's arrival in England and his subsequent placement in a deteriorating Bed and Breakfast as an extension of state governance over displaced subjects. While asylum ostensibly signifies protection, the conditions imposed upon refugees transform hospitality into an instrument of containment, where inclusion is contingent upon submission to bureaucratic and social constraints. Drawing on Derrida's theorization of hospitality as inherently violent, the study demonstrates how the host's power to grant refuge simultaneously reinforces the foreigner's subjugation. Mbembe’s necropolitics further illuminates the ways in which asylum seekers exist within a state of managed decay, where their survival is permitted yet systematically devalued. Gurnah's portrayal of the asylum process thus critiques the host nation’s myth of benevolence, exposing the coercive structures that sustain postcolonial modes of regulation and exclusion. By situating By the Sea within this theoretical framework, the article argues that the novel problematizes the ethical contradictions of asylum policies, revealing how displaced individuals are reduced to spectral presences within the host nation’s borders.