Beyond Multicultural: Cultural Hybridity in Mohsin Hamid's Novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Abstract

This paper is aimed at discussing Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist in the postmodern and postcolonial scene in order to explore the ways in which Hamid’s exploration of cultural hybridity reshapes the complex identity politics as a mutable, fluctuating and dynamic process in-between world that works to dismantle the literary horizon of the essentialized fundamentalist ‘Otherness’. In this novel, the main character Changez is a Pakistani Muslim who has ever studied and resided in the United States and has great expectations of acquiring a successful career in the corporate world. Unfortunately, he is constantly trapped, to a different extent, in the crisis of identity politics whether in the pre-9/11 context or in the Post-9/11 attack which has been a crucial turning point of social, cultural and political transformation around the globe. In this sense, whenever he constantly feels alienated, misrepresented and misjudged in his adopted country, and torn apart between two cultures in terms of settings of juxtaposing Pakistan culture and American dominance. However, the objective existence of cultural difference and heterogeneity in every historic moment of transition consistently urges Changez to move beyond the essentialized and categorized identities, relocating and redefining his cultural identity as a dynamic process in liminal space, a world ‘in-between’, due to the transnationality and transculturality in the age of globalization, though cultural clash and confrontation might be unavoidable.