Crossing the Borders of the Body Politic after 9/11: The Virus Metaphor and Autoimmunity in Hari Kunzru’s Transmission

Abstract

Named one of the 20 Best of Young British Novelists by Granta magazine, Hari Kunzru has received several awards for his works, including the Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award for his debut novel The Impressionist (2002), and New York Times Notable Book of the Year for Transmission (2004). Whereas awards usually add additional splendour to a writer and his/her works, there is a big controversy over the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the second oldest literary prize in the UK, which Kunzru has turned down. Kunzru did so on the grounds that it was sponsored by the Mail on Sunday, whose ‘pervasive hostility towards black and Asian people’ he felt was unacceptable.1 Born of an Indian father and a British mother, Kunzru has often concerned himself in his novels with the life and plight of transnational migrants, including immigrants, migrant workers, and asylum seekers. His debut novel, The Impressionist, follows the journey of a half-English and half-Indian boy who takes on several different names and identities in order to survive in British-controlled India. Transmission then takes a contemporary turn in depicting a globalized world, in which capital, information, and people flow. And yet, as represented in the novel by the spread and containment of the computer virus that wreaks havoc all over the world, this celebrated free movement in an era of globalization is, however, overshadowed by constant fear of threat from outside and by border controls.