From Post-colonial to Post-9/11: A Study of the Contemporary Pakistani-American Fiction

Abstract

Employing Giorgio Agamben's notion of “homo sacer,” I study the protagonists in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), H.M. Naqvi's Home Boy (2009) and Shaila Abdullah's Saffron Dreams (2009) as placed in a “zone of indistinction” where they, as terrorist suspects, reconfigure their ontology under law of exception. Post 9/11 US imperialism stands distinct from British colonization of the Subcontinent. Referring to Du Bois' “double consciousness,” I describe the form of Pakistani-American fiction as introducing a double narrative that resists imperial realism as well as the sovereign violence the protagonists suffer for being Muslims or for resembling Arabs.