‘Tired of Taking Sides’: Repressive Tolerance in Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Abstract

While Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist explicitly undertakes to tell ‘the story of a man’s encounter with capitalism as practiced at the very beginning of the twenty-first century’, Mira Nair’s 2012 film adaptation elides the material concerns of the novel with the imperatives of cultural tolerance. This essay examines the formal effects as well as the political and ethical implications of Nair’s revisionary message of tolerance alongside Wendy Brown’s recent critique of the latter as the discursive instrument of a Foucauldian governmentality. We argue that Nair’s adaptation effects a subtle translation of the novel’s political and economic content into the phenotypical terms of culture, the naturalized, and consequently irresolvable antagonisms of which can be managed only by the sanctioned cultural practices of liberalism. In this way the film, quite unlike the novel, does not so much interrogate the imperialist presumptions of post-9/11 discourse as it does fortify and furtively extend them.