World-Literary Registration and Refugee Identity: A Case Study of Chris Cleave’s Little Bee

Abstract

The paper extends Charlotte Spear’s (2024) reading of refugee fiction as world literature by applying Warwick research collective’s approach of “world-literary registration” to Little Bee, a novel by Chris Cleave. While Cleave's novel highlights the embodied, gendered, and racialised experiences of asylum and exile in postwar Britain, Spear showed how Mohsin Hamid's Exit West (2017) uses global abstraction and metaphor to reflect systemic crises. This essay contends that Little Bee highlights the conflicts between national identity and global connection by registering the unequal processes of the capitalist world system through its story of oil exploitation, border regulations, and refugee detention. The story dramatises the hierarchy and violence that support global capital by contrasting middle-class life in England with the oil struggle in Nigeria. The text registers both privilege and marginalisation through its alternating narrative voices Sarah, a British journalist, and Little Bee, a Nigerian asylum seeker pointing to other kinds of belonging based on moral obligation and shared vulnerability. When examining Little Bee by means of the prism of world-literary registration, it becomes clear how refugee fiction helps to reimagine belonging outside of national and legal boundaries in addition to criticising structural global injustices.

Keywords: Refugee Literature; World-Literary Registration; Displacement and Belonging; Global Capitalism; Identity Politics.