This article engages with interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to globalization and migration, and argues for their rethinking through postcolonial literature. It contends that the representation of migrant women and refugees in Nadine Gordimer’s and Amitav Ghosh’s fiction shows that we need to re‐examine not only the dominant, popular ideologies of the nation as “home” and citizenship as “belonging” but also the relations between violence, citizenship, and capitalist dispossession that often drive migration. www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17449850802410507