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Reclaiming Victimhood and Agency in Shailja Patel’s Migritude (2010) and Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways (2015)
ABSTRACT This chapter analyses Shailja Patel’s Migritude (2010) and Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways (2015) through the prism of Michael Rothberg’s concept of ‘implicated subjects.’ It shows how both works complicate notions of victimhood and agency by depicting complex precarious subjects who question the categories of ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator.’ The texts under study orient us towards Fiona Robinson’s praxis of care by generating “joint attention” (Citton 2017) and engaging with the bodies of readers/spectators, turning the latter into augmented ‘implicated subjects.’ While Sahota’s work calls for general recognition of shared vulnerability, Patel’s text and performance draw our attention to the archival nature of bodies and garments alike, while her very own body connects stories, female subjects, and bodies through her performance. Both works offer possibilities of collective attending to entangled histories of oppression, past and present, and shed light upon the specific predicament of female subjects as victims of continued forms of oppression through history.
KEYWORDS agency, archive, attention, care, body
