Fluid identities and transnational belonging in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner

‘Home’ is an issue of foremost concern in the literary works of the diasporic writers. The issue is more complicated for the members of Afghan ethnic communities, who were forced to leave their country due to some socio-political or historical upheavals. Haunted by the memory of the homeland, and the consequent feelings of alienation in the host land, these authors nurture a desire for the construction of an alternative ‘home’ that is prevalently imaginative. Salman Rushdie’s statement in his essay “Imaginary Homelands” is significant in this respect: “It may be that writers in my position, exiles or immigrants and expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, …our physical alienation from almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost, that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind” (10). Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, Khaled Hosseini (1965- ) and his family had to leave their country and migrate to the United States in the 1980s due to the Soviet War. This paper aims to critically analyze the issue of the construction of “imaginary homelands” in Hosseini’s fictional works, The kite Runner(2003), A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), and And The Mountains Echoed (2013), in terms of the representation of Afghanistan both as space and place, contemporary conditions and people’s lives and experiences.

Diaspora 1:2 1991 Caught in a Strange Middle Ground: Contesting History in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children David Lipscomb Trinity School, New York City So if I am to speak for Indian writers in England I would say this, paraphrasing G. V. Desani's H. Hatterr: the migrations of the 1950s and 1960s happened. "We are. We are here."And we are not willing to be excluded from any part of our heritage: which heritage includes . . . the right ofany member ofthis post-diaspora community to draw on its roots for its art, just as the world's community of displaced writers has always done. Salman Rushdie, "Imaginary Homelands" Salman Rushdie wrote these words in 1982, and the defensive tone makes clear that his position as an "Indian" writer was less than secure long before the "Rushdie Affair" and the infamous fatwa1 complicated the issue of his location. An Indian Muslim, born in Bombay, Rushdie has made his home in England since he left India for Rugby School at the age offourteen. His parents gave him a third homeland when they moved to Pakistan while he was at Rugby. Becoming a British citizen, earning a Cambridge degree, marrying a British woman, and later marrying an American have further complicated his expatriate status. That his right to draw on his Indian roots is not universally appreciated is made clear by looking at a few of the names his critics have recently called him, such as "a selfhating Indo-Anglian,"2 or "the overrated Eurasian writer,"3 or "a hireling of Indian origin,"4 or even "the totally assimilated and assimilable , Westernized, British-educated Asian intellectual" (Jussawalla 114). Rushdie, who in no way considers himself "self-hating" or deracinated , has, in fact, continually chosen to celebrate the very position of cultural hybridity and impurity that others now use against him. Insults are not the only things a migrant's position can produce: "Our identity [that of the Indian writer in England] is at once partial and plural. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools . . . but however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not infertile territory for a writer to occupy" ("Imaginary Homelands" 18). One ofthe products Diaspora 1:2 1991 of this territory, Rushdie believes, is a doubt that enables the migrant writer to resist the control of those who speak the discourses of cultural purity and absolute "truth." Rushdie sees this doubt springing not only from the postdiasporan territory of an Indian writer in England, but also from the position of dislocation common to all migrants. His most complete articulation of what this doubt is and how it is produced is found in his article on Gunter Grass, a writer who, as Rushdie says, "grew up ... in a house and a milieu in which the Nazi view of the world was treated quite simply as objective reality" ("On Gunter" 182). Rushdie considers Grass a migrant because his travel "across the frontiers of history" to a post-Nazi view of reality is comparable to a migrant's dislocation from place, language, and social conventions. This is what the triple disruption of reality teaches migrants: that reality is an artefact, that it does not exist until it is made, and that, like any other artefact, it can be made well or badly, and that it can also, of course, be unmade. What Grass learned on his journey across the frontiers of history was Doubt. Now he distrusts all those who claim to possess absolute forms of knowledge; he suspects all total explanations, all systems of thought which purport to be complete. ("On Gunter" 183-84) The migrant's position lacks the comforts of certitude and settlement , but it is fertile territory upon which the writer can remake reality. And unmake it. As I hope to show in this essay, unmaking a discourse that claims absolute forms of knowledge, the discourse of western historiography, is a central project of Rushdie's Midnight's Children, a novel that draws frequently on Indian roots. And as Rushdie expands the definition of a migrant to include Gunter Grass, I would like to expand...

This chapter considers Rushdie’s columns, essays, and criticism to investigate the wider social, cultural, and political landscape with which his works engage. A prolific essayist, Rushdie has commented on key moments and events. These range from his own position as a diasporic Indian living in Britain to subcontinental politics, such as the assassination of Indira Gandhi, violence in Kashmir, and new emergent forms of racism in Britain. The chapter focuses especially on the collections, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 and Step Across This Line: Collected Non-Fiction, 1992–2002, and columns and pieces he has written subsequently, and considers Rushdie’s role in internationalizing British literature and academia and his contributions to debates on race in Britain.

Jewish Diaspora

The analysis of contemporary English novels, such as Sally Rooney's Normal People (2018), Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing (2016), and Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner (2003), offers a unique opportunity to explore the intersection of machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP) within a post-humanist literary framework. This research paper employs computational techniques to examine how human experiences, emotions, and sociocultural dynamics are represented beyond traditional human-centric narratives. The post-humanist approach shifts focus from merely analyzing human emotions and character development to considering the agency of non-human elements—such as technology, culture, and the environment—in shaping narratives. Using sentiment analysis and emotion detection algorithms, the study investigates the contributions of these elements to the protagonists' emotional landscapes and how language reflects a broader, interconnected web of existence. It also explores narrative structure analysis and topic modeling to identify key themes highlighting the interplay between human and non-human actors in the texts. This includes examining how socio-political contexts and cultural artifacts influence character motivations, with an emphasis on relational dynamics within the narratives. Additionally, integrating deep learning models, such as transformer-based language models, facilitates a deeper understanding of semantic relationships and stylistic patterns. By analyzing figurative language and narrative techniques, the study reveals how the authors articulate complex themes of identity, displacement, and belonging in a world where human and non-human influences coexist. This post-humanist approach, which combines machine learning, deep learning, and NLP, enhances our appreciation of the emotional and thematic complexities in modern literature.

This chapter discusses Rushdie’s work in the context of processes of migration, the crossing of borders, and the question of identity formation. These themes are central to Rushdie’s work, which reflects his own journeys. His novels have featured prominently national and transnational migrants. Indeed, Saleem Sinai’s journeys in Midnight’s Children traverse the entire subcontinent. Focusing specifically on Shalimar the Clown and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, and with reference to The Satanic Verses, Shame, and a selection of short stories and essays from Imaginary Homelands, this chapter explores how Rushdie has approached the question of migration, identity formation, and the position of being in diaspora. The representations of community, home, and belonging and of the diaspora condition emerge in his works through border crossings, liminal spaces, and the sensory and somatic disorientation of the migrant.

Salman Rushdie, a towering figure in contemporary literature, stands as a prime exponent of diasporic writing. His work intricately navigates the shifting sands of cultural identity, grappling with displacement, fragmentation, and the constant negotiation of belonging in a globalized world. This essay delves into Rushdie's exploration of these themes, particularly focusing on his seminal work, "Imaginary Homelands," and its portrayal of the multicultural identity crisis faced by individuals uprooted from their ancestral lands. Salman Rushdie's literary world pulsates with the anxieties and triumphs of navigating multiple cultural identities. His magnum opus, "Imaginary Homelands," isn't just a collection of essays; it's a poignant symphony where displacement becomes a leitmotif, and fragmented identities seek harmony. Rushdie doesn't paint a simplistic picture of the "multicultural identity crisis." Instead, he delves into the complexities of nostalgia, where the "imaginary homeland" fuels both comfort and conflict. He challenges romanticized views of the past, urging us to embrace the fluidity of identity shaped by cross-cultural encounters. Through characters like Saleem Sinai and Gibreel Farishta, he showcases the "migrant imagination" at work, weaving new narratives from diverse threads. But Rushdie's genius lies in not shying away from the dissonance. He acknowledges the limitations of nostalgia, the power dynamics within hybridity, and the agency constrained by systemic inequalities. He critiques singular narratives, urging us to consider the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, and other identities within the diasporic experience.

IntroductionIt is often supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained.1There are many challenges for those who move from one country to settle in another. Since 2001, I have investigated the issue of gain from loss in the Chinese community of Sydney. Noting the wealth of musical genres at both community and professional levels, I decided to focus on three groups that have responded to the issue of cultural loss in diverse, yet similar ways. These groups are the Australian Catholic Chinese Community (ACCC), the Buddha's Light International Association, Sydney (BLIA SYD), and the Australian Chinese Teo Chew Association (ACTCA), three collectivities within the larger Australian Chinese community of Sydney. These ethno-specific organisations comprise Chinese immigrants and their descendents with diverse migration histories and settlement patterns. Countries of origin range from Mainland China, Taiwan and the Hong Kong Semi-Autonomous Region (SAR) to Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia and Timor-Leste. Drawing inspiration from Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands: Essays and criticism, 1981-1991, this paper will show that where there might be considerable loss through the migratory process, there is also much that can be gained. My study applies to Chinese Australians who have chosen to create a new home in Australia, rather than diasporans who might be classed as 'cosmopolitans' in their constant movement from country to country.Migration BluesIt is a well-known fact that migration is often accompanied by feelings of loss at various levels. There is, for instance, financial loss due to an acute change in employment and environment.2 Further contestation of traditional values might follow with wives and teenage children finding employment to help support the family.3 There is also an overriding sense of cultural loss experienced by many from different age groups4 who may give up on their home culture in a process that sociologist Chan Kwok-Bun terms 'passing'.5 The various efforts to cope with this and other complex issues of migration help locate and maintain the identity of diasporans in the process of assimilation and adaptation.6 Recreational places where music is performed indeed aid with maintaining a sense of home in the new country. This is revealed in the work of Casey Man Kong Lum7 and Frederick Lau,8 who have studied with great detail the function of the Chinese karaoke scene in California and Bangkok respectively.In Chinese communities everywhere, social networks have been established to facilitate a range of religious and voluntary socio-cultural organisations such as schools, religious institutions and the age-old clan system of Chinese societies; much scholarly research has been conducted in this area.9 Kuah-Pearce found that this type of social network construction assists migrants in dealing with homesickness and residual feelings of loss in several dimensions.10Religion and the 'Ethnic Event'In this paper, I propose that religious centres help instil a similar sense of belonging and future in the minds of migrants as a direct response to cultural loss. As the investigator and a member of the Sydney Chinese community (or one who has come from the same cultural zone), I began my research with the premise that the ethno-specific religious centres of a city are where one is best able to observe diasporans, and analyse ways in which they have come to approach their post-migratory experiences of cultural assimilation or preservation, or both. This perspective is inspired by Herberg's11 study of Judeo-Christian, white (non-Anglophone) immigrants in the United States. Herberg found that, as part of their adjustment process in the pre-1960 period, immigrants would cling to religion while surrendering everything else connected to the mother country. The transmission of religion into later generations remained heavily significant for the purpose of ethnic identification, while languages were often lost within the second generation. …

Diasporic literature is a literature of remembering, not only in the usual sense of the term — a literature geared towards the past, haunted by the lost country and pervaded with a general sense of nostalgia. It is also a literature of re-membering which unearths fragments of the past, pieces them together, or fails to do so, altering the perspective, exaggerating the importance of certain events or, on the other hand, toning them down, thus creating an ‘imaginary homeland’ (Rushdie, 1991). It is in this sense that in his book Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie has defined the specificity of the diasporic writer as someone who recaptures the homeland after the break and from an outside perspective; the diasporic writer’s perception may be fragmentary, but this fragmentation makes the process of recollection more intense and the fragment excavated from the past more meaningful and emblematic. And because he is not too close to the scene he is describing, the diasporic writer may gain a better perspective on things: It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge — which gives rise to profound uncertainties — that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. Writing my book in North London, looking out through my window on to a city scene totally unlike the ones I was imagining on to paper, I was constantly plagued by this problem, until I felt obliged to face it in the text, to make clear that (in spite of my original and I suppose somewhat Proustian ambition to unlock the gates of lost time so that the past reappeared as it actually had been unaffected by the distortions of memory), so that my India was just that: ‘my’ India, a version and no more than one version of all the hundreds of millions of possible versions. I tried to make it as imaginatively true as I could, but imaginative truth is simultaneously honourable and suspect, and I knew that my India may only have been one to which I (who am no longer what I was, and who by quitting Bombay never became what perhaps I was meant to be) was, let us say, willing to admit I belonged. This is why I made my narrator, Saleem, suspect in his narration; his mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory compounded by quirks of character and circumstance, and his vision is fragmentary. It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost. (Rushdie, 1991, 10) KeywordsHost CountryVirtual CommunityCritical IdentityGlobal VillageShaky GroundThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

This study presents general themes concerning cultural identity preservation and transnational identity formation among members of the Afghan Diaspora, based on an ethnographic survey of habits and practices of Afghan immigrants living in North America, Europe, and Australia. While transnational identity formations take place, the identities of Afghans are further “hyphenated” by contextual realities and cultural influences existing in their host country. This study interweaves memories of Afghanistan and the search for identity in the Afghan Diaspora in order to identify a variety of topics, such as memories of belonging to the homeland and self-created myths of historical realities that immigrants bring to the host country. These shape cultural identity formation, migration and displacement issues, the psychological and physical health of Afghans, and maintenance of Afghan cultural heritage. This study reviews inter-gender and inter-generational roles and relations, the influences of globalization, and integration or assimilation of Afghans into their host societies, or returning to Afghanistan.

This study aims at examining the impact of trauma from a psycho-social perspective, with a specific focus on the issues of psychological violence leading to social oppression, identity formation, and disenfranchisement of characters in Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner. The purpose of the psychosocial approach is to "express the recognition that there is always a close, ongoing circular interaction between an individual's psychological state and his or her social environment" (Agger 2001:307). Most of the research catering the "Afghan" problem has been from the political viewpoint, with little or no insight into psycho-social perspective dealing with identity, ethnicity, memory and gender.Since trauma is rooted in individual as well as collective forms of identity, it may affect the process of both collective and personal identity formation. This research will explore the common themes of trauma and suffering with respect to episodes of fear and violence in the book.

The Limitations of Dignity: The Novel and Human Rights

Can secularization really be dead? Apparently so; and it is pretty much buried, too, according to a recent issue of American Literature. There Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman rather adamantly insist that it would be “a fairly noncontroversial position at this point” to assume that “ours is a scholarly moment no longer persuaded by the clarities of [secularism's] stories of modernity, nor by the neat dichotomies nested within them” (645). But while the controversies may have subsided, those antagonisms resurface, as Justin Neuman persuasively shows in Fiction beyond Secularism. Indeed, while Neuman might agree with Coviello and Hickman that the present condition of postsecularity most usefully “refers to an epistemological and methodological reorientation from which history might look different” (646), it is precisely these methods (and the epistemic postures they perpetuate) that are currently found wanting. In Neuman's view, we need to find ways of “unlearning the habit of conceiving religion and secularity as opposites” (6), a point he reinforces at the close when arguing that we should “move beyond secular criticism toward the cultivation of interepistemic fluencies” (188). For this task, even the lauded “‘double vision’ of a postcolonial perspective long focused on the colonizer/colonized dyad is similarly inadequate to the irreducible pluralism of the world's modes of being, both religious and secular” (189). As these muscular complaints might imply, Neuman is unafraid to emphasize the metacritical punch and payoffs of his book. And he is justified in doing so. This monograph makes a strong contribution not only, or most obviously, to the thriving study of religion in twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing, but also to broader conversations about what it is we actually believe—in sacred and secular senses of the term—that the contemporary novel is capable of doing for a world of mutually exacerbating differences and historically irreconcilable commitments.As the book's springboard, Neuman adopts the suitably counterintuitive premise that “some of the most trenchant and far-reaching critiques of secularist ideologies, as well as the most exciting and rigorous inquiries into the legacies of the religious imagination, take place where we might least expect them: in the pages of contemporary novels composed by a transnational group of writers commonly identified as non- or even antireligious” (xi). This group offers an intriguing mix, encompassing outspoken atheists such as Ian McEwan and acclaimed chroniclers of brutality and disconsolation such as J. M. Coetzee. Another of the writers is Salman Rushdie, whose appearance may be predictable in a book concerned with interfaith friction but whose writing warrants renewed attention for the way it treads a complex line between redeeming prospects for spiritual enchantment and the instinctive critique of the tyrannies of religious hypocrisy or intolerance. To Neuman, the novel—as a medium for intellectual debate as much as for imaginative projection—appears more primed than ever to engage those “interepistemic fluencies” he thinks scholars nowadays should acquire. Contemporary writers demand from readers “an attentiveness to echoes, intertexts, and genealogies of religiosity often neglected by literary critics” (16). This is not just a matter of thematic concern; formally, too, fiction offers aesthetic correlatives for “multiple, overlapping, and shifting modes of belonging” (14). Neuman thus asserts—in a sentence unfortunately repeated verbatim on page 181—that being “heteroglossic texts, novels are particularly efficient cultural containers; the sustained imaginative investment required to read them, meanwhile, fosters diverse forms of ethical modeling” (14). (A more glaring instance of this sort of repetition turns up in chapter 1, where a rather abstract statement from James Clifford celebrating “diverse cosmopolitan encounters” [31] is quoted again as though for the first time on the following page.) Above all it is the “sustained imaginative investment,” in Neuman's favored phrase, that “is the lifeblood of literature,” which can “provide the cultural resources—semantic, narrative, and imagistic—for thinking beyond secularism” (18).Neuman probes the narrative expression and critical efficacy of these resources over the course of five chapters: two are devoted to single authors (Rushdie and Coetzee); the remaining three are wide-ranging, blending attention to speeches and governmental texts with close (though largely thematic) readings of multiple novels, some iconic, others less familiar. Chapter 1, “Rushdie's Wounded Secularism,” reads against the grain Rushdie's engagement in The Satanic Verses and in numerous essays with secularization as progress. Neuman fruitfully recovers Rushdie's vision of fiction as an enchanting compensation for culture's “god-shaped holes” (41). An extended section on Rushdie's novel Shalimar the Clown then reveals how its author “sets out to interrogate some of the most axiomatic premises of his secularist commitments, including the necessary relation between cosmopolitan pluralism and the secularization of the public sphere” (28). Neuman completes his discussion of Rushdie's work with a consideration of The Enchantress of Florence, arguing that the novel “severs the links between secularism and its traditional allies: skepticism, reason, and dispassionate analysis” (46).“For far too long,” protests Neuman, “scholars of the novel have abetted the project of solidifying a tenuous equivalence between the novel as a genre and secularization as a normative project” (47). One might assume that Coetzee would be an ideal candidate for this equation. But when Neuman considers in his second chapter the ways that Life and Times of Michael K, Age of Iron, Disgrace, and Elizabeth Costello invoke “religious forms of ascetic self-fashioning” (52), he demonstrates that while “Coetzee will never be mistaken for a Christian apologist,” his fiction nonetheless “reflects a deep preoccupation with concepts like apocalypse and redemption, grace and disgrace, and charity and sacrifice” (59). In a particularly cogent and sensitive reading of Age of Iron, Neuman reassesses the gift of mutual care that develops between the terminally ill Elizabeth Curren and the homeless Vercueil, to whom Elizabeth offers shelter and who in turn offers unlikely comfort—becoming, as she poignantly describes him at one point, the “weak reed I lean upon” (131). Neuman observes that by “naturalizing charity to an instinctual and almost vicious response, Elizabeth repudiates the ethical primacy accorded to charity in Christian traditions while ironically affirming one of the central tenants of agapic love—namely, its equal regard for others over and against the selective criteria of erotic, maternal, and filial love” (79). This is a fluently argued and genuinely distinctive contribution to Coetzee criticism, revealing how his fiction presents “suffering protagonists not merely as victims but also as agents,” who “often answer questions of right action against the needs of human flourishing and find their most reliable measure of the good in sustained practices of self-abasement” (93).Chapter 3, “Time and Terror,” turns to the legacies of 9/11 and considers McEwan's Saturday, Don DeLillo's Falling Man, and Jess Walter's The Zero in light of what Neuman terms chronomania: “an obsession with time and a concomitant disruption of temporal experience that characterizes representations of the attacks and their aftermath” (96). The discussion also takes in The 9/11 Commission Report—which receives a closer reading as “an object of aesthetic consumption” (116) than do many of the fictional texts—suggesting that it “reads more like a political thriller than the bureaucratic white paper a bipartisan committee with a $15 million budget and a staff of over eighty might be expected to produce” (115). Rather refreshingly, meanwhile, Saturday is not treated as dismissively as it has been by those keen to see it as socially elitist or simply an exercise in neuro-aesthetics. Neuman effectively combats derogatory characterizations of McEwan as a righteous rationalist penning a parable of war, pointing out that such interpretations rely on “causal claims” about the “analogy between Baxter's assault and Islamist extremism” (104). With this comes an additional warning: the very critical compulsion to “read Baxter's intrusion as an allegory of global terrorism” falls prey “to one of the chief narcissisms of the post-9/11 world: the notion that we live in an unbounded, ever-present time of terror” (104–5). In this thoughtful chapter, DeLillo and McEwan are cast in quite a reflexive light, “crafting narratives that appear to fulfil prevalent post-9/11 stereotypes and fantasies and then undermining them” (106). Once Neuman adds rhetorical analyses of President George W. Bush's September 20, 2001, speech and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, the chapter's argumentative through line is somewhat diluted, and one wonders whether ultimately it adds up to more than the sum of its parts, effective though the readings of McEwan and DeLillo are individually. Moreover, given the chapter's canonically white lineup (though Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid does get a brief aside), it is somewhat surprising that Neuman does not reach out to a more capaciously multiethnic corpus of responses to the attacks and their transnational ramifications. Despite what he himself calls the “rapidly growing shelf of 9/11 novels” (127), his own choices are arguably somewhat uniform in background. No doubt pragmatic decisions about selection had to be made, ethnicities aside, and the writers were chosen here for being in tune with the conceptual model of temporality Neuman is advancing. However, given his later contention “that we need a more robustly comparative theological perspective in literary studies” (146), it is noticeable that 9/11 criticism can still have some trouble satisfying these noble aspirations.Chapter 4, “Messianic Narrative,” builds on some of the foundations of reenchantment laid in the earlier discussion of Rushdie, as Neuman turns to the way Orhan Pamuk, Anne Michaels, and Haruki Murakami “stage the encounter with unwitnessed traumas of the past as a form of messianic event” (137). Such an approach has interpretive as much as thematic implications, for Neuman proposes that once “we bring the resources of a critical messianism to bear on fictions of inheritance, we can begin to see them, and the act of reading, as a performative solicitation to the past as Other that transmutes an isolated and devastating inheritance into a communal act that holds something like an emancipatory promise” (146). This is a provocative contention, but unfortunately it is one of those sentences that reappears a few pages later (152), almost unchanged, which only exacerbates the occasionally recursive register and lexicon of Neuman's prose. Still, the chapter unfolds with appealing variety. McEwan makes a brief comeback, with Atonement providing a pertinent conclusion. An opportunity here is missed, though: more than half of this discussion consists of plot summary, culminating in the suggestive idea that Atonement “implies a fuzzy ontology” about the condition of at-one-ment it dramatizes, a condition “that can be brought into tighter focus through the lens of weak messianism” (154). As motive and motif, “atonement” may emerge in McEwan's narrative as “the description of an intersubjective state” (154). One cannot help feeling that Neuman has left himself little space in which to do justice to what it is, exactly, about Atonement's texture that enriches the novel's formal enactment of the appeal to impossible redemption McEwan plots.The final chapter, “Reading Islam,” offers a rigorous consideration of Khaled Hosseini's best-seller, The Kite Runner, as a novel “[b]eginning with sin and redemption” that “renders key moments in Amir's spiritual awakening through the tropes and rhetoric of notable interfaith resonance” (165). By contrast, in a section where Neuman is most explicit about his misgivings, Yann Martel's Life of Pi “serves as a reminder of how thin the rhetoric or pluralism and spirituality can be, even as it signals a deep desire for substantive interfaith dialogue in a climate of conservative religious revival” (173). With the end in sight, Neuman shifts again into a more methodological mood. Just as contemporary secularist thought has looked disparagingly upon the more visceral aspects of experience in the name of reason, so for him reading itself “suffers from a similar estrangement from the corporeal” (173).Looking back at the preceding chapters in the context of this statement, it's all the more noticeable that Neuman's own readings do not always counteract this neglect of somatic response in “textual encounters with alterity” at the level of form (173). For all their thoroughness with regard to diegetic details and dissonances, his own encounters are themselves somewhat estranged from matters of technique. To be sure, the necessary signposts are all there—“[a]t the level of style and form” (12), “[o]n a formal level” (22)—but what often ensues is only indirectly or fleetingly concerned with formal specificity. Opportunities for this level of reading are lost when long quotes are presented from Shalimar, for instance, that receive no hands-on textual analysis (31). Likewise, a potential opening for form is promised when Neuman suggests that “[b]y aligning himself with the stylistic and political norms of the modernists, Rushdie appeals to the idea that literature might serve as a surrogate for religion in a secular world” (42). But this observation is stated rather than formally substantiated, left tantalizingly underdeveloped in the context of subsequent readings. As such Neuman passes up the chance to trace for his reader—in a more patient, textually particularizing way—how the politics of Rushdie's modernist style connects to the work of reenchantment. Similarly, in Coetzee's case we are told at one point that a passage from Michael K “is one of the novel's most resistant and haunting” (65), but the quote in question does not really get the kind of attention—in terms of diction, tempo, or stress—that would show how it formally resists and haunts with equal measure. Certainly there are exceptions. Neuman offers a compelling and illuminating take on the way Falling Man's “form echoes” the “spiralling pattern” of temporal experience reminiscent of the World Trade Center's stairs down which DeLillo's Keith escapes, a pattern that in turn “symbolizes the mode of suspension prior to ethical judgment or agential action that the novel attempts to reclaim as a site of resistance to the teleological war on terror” (110). Elsewhere, though, form's effects are mentioned rather than engaged, as in Murakami's case: his stylistic “strangeness generates a phenomenology of encounter that resonates with a field of messianic tensions,” yet the following discussion operates predominantly at the level of narrative events (147).Neuman concludes his final chapter by warning that “[r]eviewers, book club guides, pedagogic practices, and paratextual materials reveal that readers overwhelmingly approach texts about Islamic societies as semitransparent containers of ethnographic content” (181). Given how attached to character and plot his own readings can become, he can't always escape the trap of finding novels salient primarily because of their ostensible content—however much he wants to treat them as far from transparent, to uncover their contradictions, and to reveal their complicated compatibility with “aspects of religiosity that privilege questioning, debate, and polyvocalism” (187). Nevertheless, Fiction beyond Secularism is unafraid of setting a bold and evocative agenda, and the extent to which Neuman genuinely cares about the stakes of his intervention is everywhere apparent (not least in his timely coda, “The Novel and the Secular Imagination”). Indeed, he is a most energetic devil's advocate for religion. For that reason, his book will make readers look back from the contemporary to reconsider other phases in the novel's secularization: by asking, for instance, whether modernist fiction too was really as enchanted as we might assume with the relentless project of disenchantment. Such are the larger implications of this book. Spiritedly argued, it is a sterling defense of how critical and creative discourses alike can help readers examine with greater clarity the religious imagination amid the hubbub of competing claims about our postsecularity.

<i>Islamophobia and the Novel</i>. Peter Morey. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. Pp. vii+314.

Since the 11th of September, 2001, the media and American public have been obsessed by all things Islamic and Middle Eastern, as the war on terrorism has been essentially engaged against various countries and peoples believed to be terrorists, including Afghanistan. Since America’s declaration of war on terrorism, people have been flocking to bookstores to find and read up on topics like Islam, terrorism, the conflict in the Middle East, and more. While there have been many documentaries published on the Taliban, Osama Bin Laden, and women’s rights in the region, there were still no works of fiction in English published by an Afghan author until 2003. Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 novel, The Kite Runner presents itself as a powerful depiction of the formation of a complex Afghan-American cultural identity against the backdrop of the turbulence of modern Afghanistan. Political change throughout the book influenced people in Afghanistan. Anthems as national and/or religion folklore of Afghanistan make a better sense of pure culture and ideology and the translation of them may help to show the real face of Afghani’s better. This study examined the anthems in The Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini and their Persian Translation by Mehdi Ghabraei in accordance with Vahid Dastjerdi’s proposed model of poetry translation on the basis of both textual and extra-textual levels. The results vary from one item to another. The researchers hope that this little work may help to show the innocent spirit of East to reduce the wars and killings there.