The Emergent Writes Back: Emergent Ethnic Self-History Recasting Dominant Ethnohistory in Khaled Hosseini’s Fiction

Abstract

“Anglophone,” “Postcolonial,” Diasporic,” “Transnational,” “Ethnic,” “Multicultural,” “Cosmopolitan,” and “Emergent” are all umbrella terms that are used to lump together writers who write from the fringes of the Western center. Such writers, however various and different their literary productions are, create worlds in their stories and populate them with characters that defy and counteract many Western essentialist misconceptions about their homelands. In this context, and resonating with Salman Rushdie’s seminal statement— “the empire writes back to the center”—and Smaro Kamboureli’s “the diaspora writes back home” (30), I argue that “the emergent” also writes back as a response to the dominant mainstream discourse. This paper seeks to read Khaled Hosseini’s fiction as an exemplar of an emergent narrative that deals with Afghanistan’s ethnic self-history and voices the gory details that can only be perceived and mirrored through the lenses of an insider. Being a diasporic ethnic writer, Hosseini’s fiction discredits the Western ethnohistory that mainly offers an essentialist depiction of the writer’s homeland, typifying, thereby, the colonial discourse as dominant.