Love in Transit: The Plasticity ofLove in Mohsin Hamid’s Exit Westand Sharon Bala’s The Boat People

This paper is an analysis of the plasticity of love and its appropriation as an effective strategy for those in power to deal with the refugee crisis. Itcontendsthat a contextualization of love is neededto point to some of the waysin which love’s plasticity is employed to combat refugee uprisings. Through an analysis of Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West(2017) and Sharon Bala’s The Boat People(2018), this paper demonstrates how the ruling governments, of different contexts, either overtly orcovertly, resort to politicizing love in order to defusetensionsbetween refugees and “insiders”.