Exploring Un/homely Lives in Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Abstract

This paper aims to explore Homi Bhabha’s concept of unhomeliness in Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). An influential postcolonial theorist, Bhabha offered new perspectives on the identities of and the relation between the colonizer and the colonized and he contributed to postcolonial theories, and studies by introducing key concepts including ambivalence, mimicry, hybridity, liminality, and unhomely. This paper intends to employ Bhabha’s concept of unhomeliness to provide insight into Changez’s and Erica’s sense of identity and belonging, emotional and mental reactions and attitudes which are mostly influenced by their relation with space which generates the feeling of unhomeliness. Bhabha’s notion of unhomely has been derived from Freud’s notion of uncanny which has been translated from the German word unheimliche. Bhabha’s concept of unhomely is closely related to his concept of hybridity. According to Bhabha, there is no culture (and thus no identity) which remains pure, untouched, unaltered and uncontaminated by the foreign influence of the other cultures. This inevitable process of cultural hybridity creates the conditions of unhomeliness since no culture, nation or territory can function as a home since home is uncannily familiar and strange at the same time for individuals. Unhomeliness creates complex situations and poses challenges for Changez and Erica who feel unhomely at home or feel at home in a strange and unfamiliar context when they recognize the existence of the other in the self but fail to figure out how to handle this complexity. This paper sets out to explore Changez’s and Erica’s disturbed relations to home as they oscillate between homeliness and unhomeliness due to the return of the repressed when Pakistani and American cultures came into close contact before and after the blowback of the 9/11 terrorist attacks which destabilized the fixed boundaries.