If world literature is conceived as a network of transregional, multi-local and transnational nodes stretching back to antiquity, oceanic worlds can be seen to offer a generative frame for literary history. The world’s oceans gird the shores of cities, nations, islands and continents. They generate contact zones that are multilingual, demographically mixed, economically varied and culturally hybrid. Further, much like world literature, the historicity of the oceans can scarcely be contained within the temporality of transatlantic capitalism from the eighteenth century to the present. This chapter explores literary works across several oceanic zones and offers oceanic comparativism as a rich cartographic frame for world literature.

This chapter considers what happens to the cartography of ‘world literature’ in times of mass migration and indefinite detention. It focuses on contemporary literature by and about refugees and asylum seekers, using the distinction between emic (written from the perspective of the subject) and etic (written from the perspective of the observer) narratives. It turns to representations of refugees in ‘hospitable’ narratives, such as graphic narrative and contemporary novels, and questions the ethics of recognition in humanitarian storytelling. In a case study of Behrouz Boochani’s autobiographical novel No Friend But the Mountains, a paperless text ‘thumbed’ by a Kurdish Iranian asylum seeker on a smartphone in Farsi at the remote detention centre on Manus Island, PNG, and translated by a transnational authorial assemblage of human and nonhuman agents, it considers how new technologies now transform the possibilities for a literature from the camps in the borderlands where refugees and asylum seekers are detained.