أطراس
Volume 7, Numéro 2, Pages 40-50
2026-07-15
The Enemy Within The Walls: Examining The Ontological Dimension Of Borders In John Lanchester’s The Wall And Prayaag Akbar’s Leila
Authors : Mukhopadhyay Arka . Kotak Nutan .
Abstract
This paper takes up a comparative reading of two works of speculative fiction, Leila by Prayaag Akbar and The Wall by John Lanchester, to embark upon a broader question regarding the ontological dimension of the borderization process. While a euphoria surrounding the globalization rhetoric still pervades dominant cultures across the globe, we perceive a simultaneous retreat from the globalized order to address a reservation of the collective against those who are deemed aliens and outsiders. The neurotic urge to identify an out-group, or an enemy, ultimately culminates in the materialization of the cartographic imagination in the construction of border walls. These walls, beyond their material and spatial situatedness, also symbolize the crises of communities, where the identification of an enemy becomes an ontological necessity. But what if the enemy has already pervaded the walls? What if the monstrous enemy and the human self cannot be kept separate? Modernity’s failure of binaries and subsequent foreclosure underlie a fragmentation of the ontological construction of the self as a unity. Then, the borders are ultimately attempts of a Deleuzian control society to assert a racial and anthropocentric superiority following the dismantling of institutions of enclosure. The anxiety of the loss of familial and institutional bounds takes the material shape of borders, but the crisis entails that the process is never complete. Following Mbembe’s theory of borderization and Claeys’s political dystopia, among others, the paper seeks to read the two aforementioned novels to perceive the symbolic and ontological implications of the borderization process.
Keywords
Borderization ; Control Society ; Leila ; Lanchester ; Ontology ; Political Dystopia ; Walls
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