“The rules of the game have changed”: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and post‐9/11 fiction
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Abstract
This paper argues that Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) challenges the orthodoxies of the post‐9/11 novel that, until its publication, had generally taken the form of documents of personal trauma and loss, or recapitulations of unproblematic notions of essential cultural difference, and that took as its default position a “clash of civilizations” mindset. Hamid’s novel tells the story of the life experiences and eventual disillusionment of a gifted young Pakistani, who moves from fully interpellated capitalist “fundamentalist” and post‐political transnational subject to racially profiled (and possibly hunted) anti‐American firebrand. Yet, in doing so, it refuses to articulate the kind of confession, charting the road to Islamist radicalism, one might expect from the title, and instead employs hyperbole, strategic exoticism, allegory and unreliable narration to defamiliarize our reading experience and habitual identifications, forcing us to be the kind of deterritorialized reader demanded by the emerging category of world literature.