Uncanny Journeys: Magical Realism in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and Omar El-Akkad’s What Strange Paradise
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article presents a reading of two contemporary novels, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017) and Omar El-Akkad’s What Strange Paradise (2021), in the light of magical realism. The article first attempts to define magical realism as a genre loaded with potential. Bringing together two works, the first by a British-Pakistani writer and the second by an Egyptian-Canadian writer, it argues that these novels use magical realism as a global genre and infuse reality with fantasy to re-write the narrative of the refugee. Looking at the journeys in the novels not only as itineraries but also as narrative and literary modes, the article reflects on the use of certain fantastical “uncanny” (to borrow Freud’s term) literary devices within those texts to unsettle the dichotomy between the world of the real and the world of imagination in which both characters and readers decipher routes of navigating the unheimlich. The article thus shows magical realism’s subversive potential and its ability to engage contemporary issues.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".