Mobility, Belonging and the Utopia of a Borderless World: A Spatial and Identitarian Reading of Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers

This chapter examines the functionality of boundaries in Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers (2016), a novel that offers thought-provoking images of the impact that a multiplicity of borders and social divides (of nationality, race, gender, class, etc.) have on people’s lives in the twenty-first century. Drawing upon a variety of spatial, postcolonial, and feminist theorisations, the chapter demonstrates that Behold the Dreamers not only associates borders with exclusionary practices and webs of oppression that harm the protagonists; it also represents alternative spaces of encounter and growth which suggest the permeability of barriers and the possibility of turning margins into sites of resistance and self-development. These complex spatial dynamics enable Mbue to denounce the limits of globalisation, to explore the effects of recent debordering/rebordering processes, and to interrogate the attainability of a more inclusive world based on utopian projects of unbounded mobility and borderlessness. Furthermore, Mbue’s capacious, world-literature novel raises some problems of classification, inviting us to rethink critical boundaries and established literary categories.