From Cheap Labor to Overlooked Citizens: Looking for British Muslim Identities in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

Abstract

Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire is an adaptation of the Greek play Antigone contextualized in a post 9–11 Britain. Seen through the prism of a transnational framework, this novel is a narrative of British Muslims and their negotiations of their British Muslim identity. The intersecting trajectories of two families forms the narrative impetus and scaffolds the social, political and economic discourses within which the text is to be read. If Shamsie’s scene of race-religion interpellation is one way in which the narrative of Home Fire is framed, the cross cutting of British policies and legislation based on state anxieties is the other. In this paper, I offer parallel readings of the text and the discourses of the state that show radicalization’s emergence as a primary risk in the consciousness of the Global North; as a result, not only are the rights of citizenship curtailed, a certain cultural identity is produced that offers limited subject positions to the British Muslims. Intertextual readings of Home Fire and policy making in Britain reveals the limitations and sinister intentions of the state discourses around policing of communities and production of identities.