Aspirational exile: rethinking the formation of estrangement and African postcolonial identity in Slimani’s In The Country of Others

Abstract

This article rethinks exile not as a condition that begins after rupture, but as a formation that may begin earlier, when desire itself is organized by unequal histories of mobility, intimacy, and belonging. Reading Leïla Slimani’s In the Country of Others as a work of African cultural production and a work of Moroccan postcolonial fiction, we argue that the novel exposes the production of estrangement before visible loss. To theorize this process, we develop the concept of aspirational exile. The term describes a form of estrangement in which mobility is desired rather than imposed, yet remains shaped by unequal imaginaries of elsewhere. Within this configuration, intimacy becomes a medium of discipline, belonging remains conditional despite attachment and usefulness, and return fails to restore origin. Through sequential close reading, we show how fantasy authorizes movement, self-fashioning becomes disciplinary labor, return retrospectively reclassifies desire, and endurance persists without freedom or reconciliation. We therefore redirect attention within exile studies from displacement after breakage to the earlier scene in which elsewhere first becomes imaginable under unequal conditions. In doing so, we offer aspirational exile as a framework for reading African postcolonial identity, intimate asymmetry, and the historical organization of desire.