Metropolitan Hybrid Identity in Nadia Hashimi’s A House Without Windows

Abstract

The present article seeks to investigate the effect of colonial domination on Afghan society by analyzing Yusuf’s character in Nadia Hashimi’s A House Without Windows (2016). By theoretically framing the paper at Orientalism, the paper scrutinizes Hashimi’s approach to exemplify the concept of metropolitan hybridity through mimicry and Othering; how Yusuf internalizes the value of the colonizer and believes in the inferiority of his own culture. The paper analyses how Yusuf represents a colonialist ideology that reinforces the binary opposition of the West and East, a hybrid Afghan and the native Afghan. This article engages with debates around Orientalism and the construction of Western power that schematizes the inferiority of the East. It questions the strategies that are used to represent Yusuf as a hybrid Afghan, the strategies that help to produce an Orientalist discourse. The article signifies Yusuf’s imitation as a double articulation strategy: mimicking the Occident while disavowing and Other the native Afghans.