This talk focuses on the contemporary refugee novel, keeping in mind the often-repeated claim that the refugee is the iconic figure of the contemporary era and that the border is itself an aesthetic phenomenon – it is seen, narrated, comprehended through metaphor and analogy. I explore how the contemporary refugee novel reshapes and makes legible historical experiences that are still unfolding, refusing the spectacular immediacy of traumatic images of refugees focused on crisis without cause in favor of giving them voice and subjectivity. The paper goes beyond the usual arguments for the value of fiction – its capacity to cultivate empathy and invite identification, or to disrupt the exclusions of legal regimes via narrative experimentation, or to refuse to succumb to the demands of verifiability. The somewhat anodyne turn to the attempt to humanize the refugee, or to stage familiar dynamics of recognition or estrangement doesn’t seem adequate to the crisis we face. To explore how the refugee novel is a racialized form, allowing for useful accounts of relation across US racial formations and the postcolony, I turn to Toni Morrison’s 1997 novel, Paradise, for its theorization of sanctuary and borderlessness, alongside several other recent refugee fictions.