(Un)Palatable encounters: Melancholic appetites in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing on scholarship on racial melancholia and food studies, this article traces the melancholic appetites manifested in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and examines how alimentary desires stand in for the consumptive desires of the US nation state in relation to the model minority as well as the recuperative mourning undertaken by the protagonist Changez upon his return to Pakistan. A double encounter with Lahori cuisine and melancholic testimony in the novel pushes the American interlocutor towards acknowledging a political responsibility for the consequences of US actions during the War on Terror. Hamid’s work highlights how melancholic subjects challenge nationalist narratives of racial progress by unearthing those racialized experiences which have been submerged, silenced, or underemphasized. This article thus highlights the possibility raised by the novel for grieving and healing the psychological wounds of racism so that Changez, the minoritized subject, does not remain locked into generational cycles of dejection.