Top Research Papers on The Reluctant Fundamentalist PDF

This essay explores the significance of Mohsin Hamid’s bestselling novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist in the historicization of September 11, 2001. Most writers who depict the coordinated attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have been extremely reluctant to suggest the possibility that the event is already historical. That is, that it may have a past, specifically Chile’s US-backed coup d’etat of September 11, 1973. Hamid is one of the rare exceptions. In the process, he also contests Henry Kissinger’s dictum that “Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been...

This paper examines how Muslims are harshly treated after the backlash of 9/11 in Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist and how they become victims and legitimate targets of hate crimes, negative media stereotypes, physical beatings, disappearance, racial profiling, interrogations at American airports, and detentions in secret places. It addresses how such treatment sheds light on the questions of Muslim integration in the American society, citizenship, multiculturalism, identity, and alienation, belonging, and national affiliation. It also disrupts the dominant American official d...

The metamorphosis of Changez, the main character in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, following 9/11 is the main emphasis of this paper, which examines the issues of identity and alienation in the book. It examines how the attacks disrupted the cultural and personal identities of immigrants in America, leading to a crises of belonging. By analyzing Changez’s narrative, the paper highlights the effects of ethnical profiling, xenophobia, and global politics on individual and collective identity. It comes to the conclusion that the book offers a moving analysis of the divisive views of...

This research paper aims at soft power in the novel “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” by Mohsin Hamid. It throws light on the character of Changez, who becomes a victim of soft power of American culture and its policies. Changez is a brilliant student but he strongly supports American culture and tries to become part of it. This research qualitatively analyzes the text of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” and highlights those events which reveal that America tries to influence Changez. This research follows close reading of the novel. America has strong influence on his mind but it will never accept...

For some time we have witnessed the emergence of a generation of "postcolonial" writers for whom (post)colonialism has become an increasingly distant family memory. They understandably find it rather tedious to be read first and foremost as representative of a certain cultural and national context. In contrast to this, Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid appears to willingly accept the ambitious task of "explaining" his country to his readers. Meanwhile it seems that at least Western audiences continue to be in desperate need of such explanation, given the limited knowledge about other parts of the ...

This article explores the theme of cultural crossroads in Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Through an analysis of protagonist Changez’s journey, the study examines the complexities of identity negotiation and cultural hybridity in the context of globalization. Drawing on literary reviews and critical analyses, the research highlights how Hamid portrays Changez’s struggle with not being assimilated and his evolving sense of self amidst shifting socio-political landscapes. The findings reveal the novel’s multifaceted depiction of cultural identity amidst post-9/11 tensions, she...

This paper analyzes Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist that demonstrates Changez's intercultural relations with non-Muslim characters such as Erica, her father, his co-workers at Underwood Samson. The non-Muslim employees at Underwood Samson suspect Changez because of his beard as the American society has a mindset of beard. Erica‒Changez's beloved, and her father stereotype Changez based on his dress and beard. The beard reminds Americans of the 9/11 perpetrators. Their suspicion leads to detachment between Changez and non-Muslim characters in the aftermath. I employ John W. Berry's ...

Literature has always been considered as the reflection of human life because of its involvement with human behavior, thoughts, activity, development, progress, etc. Sometimes while reading a literary text, readers often face complicated characters that are quite troublesome and create difficulty to understand but at the same time, these characters generate curiosity in the mind of the readers to know more about them. Such a character is Changez from the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. This article aims to explain the behavior of Changez, the protagonist of the novel The Reluctant Fundamen...

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid sparks a debate on liberal humanism, and its repercussion during post-9/11 throws Neo-Orientalism and Islamic terrorism into question—recounted by Hamid. The novel mirrors all aspects of humanism and liberal intellection as a cultural product of humanism in the West. Hamid’s sensibilities of the fluctuant Western paradigm opposing immigrants, fundamentalism, and terrorism during post-9/11 is depicted from the protagonist’s perspective. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is invigorated in a threshold world of multiple borders—of characters and cultures—by ...

Belonging is depicted as ethically transgressive in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which deconstructs belonging (as in a state of ownership) to the self’s longing (be longing) for what is eternally elusive or other about itself. Hamid’s novel demonstrates that this longing implicates the self in sacrificial violence against others. The collusive link between longing and violence in the novel is discussed in this paper with reference to Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death, which argues that responsibility to the other is contingent on the sacrificial violence of love.

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist responds tentatively to the question Judith Butler posed in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks: ‘is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief?’ (Butler 2004: xii). Drawing on recent theorisations of precarity by Butler and Isabell Lorey, this paper argues that in this novel Hamid proposes an ethico-political theory of grief that refuses to conform to existing modes of post-9/11 mourning. This model does not stoke nationalist fervour, or reiterate exceptional circumstances of trauma, but instead advocates a continuous engagem...

The Reluctant Fundamentalist offers a more recent and contemporary portrayal of  9/11 fiction. This thesis uses postcolonial theory to analyze Mohsin Hamid’s novel, published in 2007. The novel chronicles the protagonist Changez’s life before, during, and after the 9/11 and how his view of America’s capitalism and imperialism-centered society and his identity shifts in the wake of the attacks. It is allegories to display identity and has frequently been used in post-colonial discourse to mean simply cross-cultural 'exchange' to the Pakistani immigrant named Changez Khan in the novel. The novel...

ABSTRACT As noted by critics, sexual intimacy in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist emerges as an allegory of post–9/11 tensions. A prominent feature of the allegory is the depiction of healing as an opening for sexual intimacy. This paper demonstrates the invasiveness that healing acquires on account of the 9/11 novel’s interweaving of intimacy and terror. The focus of this paper lies on the two instances of love–making, in which injuries are put to work in ways that expose how healing potentially trespasses on the inaccessibility of others. The text’s arming of healing, which has hi...

'What is the purpose of your trip to the United States?' she asked me.'I live here,' I replied.'That is not what I asked you, sir,' she said.- Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant FundamentalistAs a response to socio-political developments in the US and its global actions since September 11, 2001, a number of new and established authors from Muslim backgrounds - such as Mohsin Hamid, Michael Muhammad Knight, Khaled Hosseini, and Mohja Kahf - have reviewed American civic life through the lens of social imaginaries of a heterogeneous minority whose very identity has been under critical scrutiny since the...

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 racia...

Abstract: This essay explores the viability of developing non- dualistic identities in a globalized world that imposes neo- imperialistic hierarchies like old/new, east/west, oppressed/oppressor, and terrorist/terrorized. Incorporating theories of the contact zone, translocality, and contemporary coloniality, I analyze how Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) blurs the division between past and present and shows how seemingly distant spaces like Pakistan, the United States, and Chile are all connected. Although it has often been interpreted as a post-9/11 novel, The Reluctant Fun...

This article offers a comparative reading of the novel and film adaptation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, looking at the ways these texts represent changing Western public perceptions towards Pakistan and vice-versa along the temporal axis 2001–2007–2012. Both novel and film are informed by the post-9/11 distrust of the Muslim other. Mohsin Hamid’s novel was begun before 9/11 and published seven years later, in 2007; Mira Nair’s film adaptation followed in 2012, with a premiere at the Venice Film Festival (as the opening film) and the Toronto Film Festival. Ostensibly more conciliatory than ...

This paper underscores the existential status of the immigrants in the United States of America as portrayed in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist written as a response to the 9/11 attacks occurred on 11 September 2001. In the post-9/11 situation, the identity of Pakistani immigrants is more at risk than before because of the perpetrators’ religious identity as widely perceived to be extreme. Being Pakistani means being part of a society divided into different groups that are at odds with each other over religious, sectarian and political issues. In such a situation, where Pakistan do...

This paper aims at investigating the nostalgic impact on the characters in The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. Nostalgia is regarded as the state of homesick or a mental sentimentality for one's past. Everyone is more or less nostalgic, and nostalgia plays a vital role in the lives and experiences of individuals in daily life. The present study is a qualitative and descriptive textual analysis. The Reluctant Fundamentalist has been examined by analyzing the words, sentences, characters and their actions from the nostalgic point of view. This study has investigated the nostalgic impac...

The author reads from, discusses and responds to questions about his novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a narrative concerning the psychological consequences of the events of 9/11 for a young Pakistani man working in corporate America. Themes of nostalgia, alienation and distrust are explored, as well as the role that literature can play in sustaining ambivalence.

In this paper, I investigate how Muslim identity came under literary and political scrutiny after the attacks of 9/11. I explore the development and struggle for agency of those marginalised in post-9/11 America, as discussed in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). By focusing on Hamid’s protagonist Changez, a Pakistani immigrant, I expand on Gayatri Spivak’s definition of the subaltern. I investigate how borders play a vital role in the process of marginalisation, and my examination of border crossings paves the way for a different sort of postcolonial existence, which I call t...

In contemporary political discourse, the term ‘post-truth’ denotes rhetorical techniques often directed at garnering popular support. Post-truth techniques were, for instance, said to have characterised Donald Trump's presidential campaign in the United States as well as the Brexit lobby in the United Kingdom. This article proposes an alternative interpretation of ‘post-truth’, approaching it as a challenge to dominant systems of knowledge expressed through literary narratives. This essay puts forward a consideration of ‘decolonial post-truth’ as a rhetorical technique inspired by Walter Migno...

Mohsin Hamid is a Pakistani novelist who holds British citizenship. He is the author of Moth Smoke (2000) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). Hamid's first novel was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist became an international best seller. It was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. The Guardian selected it as one of the books "that defined the decade" ("What We Were Reading"). The story of an ambitious Pakistani immigrant disenchanted with American life after 9/11, The Reluc...

Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist offers an interesting voice in the dis‑ cussion about post ‑9/11 America and shows how a successful immigrant story changes to a racially charged case of ethnic discrimination. Despite the fact that Hamid’s protagonist may believe in his successful assimilation into American culture, the general feeling of xenophobia that gripped American society in the wake of the 9/11 attacks forces him to re ‑evaluate his position. His personal dilemma, oscillating between the desire for mate‑ rial affluence and ethnic loyalty, is presented in a broader cont...

AbstractThis essay takes as its starting point that the Swedish classroom often is an intercultural environment and that it is therefore important to address issues connected to ethnocentrism in it. In this essay I examine how the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid can be used in schools to raise such ethnocentric issues. The novel’s didactic potential becomes clear by capturing some of the views held by the book’s protagonist as an alternative to Western ethnocentric concepts. Furthermore, the ambiguity of the novel allows for students to reflect on the identification processe...

America was founded on the idea of the melting pot that guarantees success, an opportunity to prosperity and social upward regardless of race, religion or status at birth. After the events of 9/11, the idealized notion of the melting pot was abandoned. Therefore, another version of America initiates fueled by post-9/11 xenophobia and President Bush administration’s “war on terror” launched on the pretext of promoting democracy. The Bush Doctrine, however, represented terrorism as a cause rather than an effect of the long history of Western colonization, oppression and manipulation of the Musli...

Abstract:This article examines the implications of particular representational and narrative strategies that postcolonial writers, especially from Muslim-majority nations, can utilize to respond to 9/11 and its aftermath. Mohsin Hamid's novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist has been hailed as the paradigmatic counter-discursive, antiimperialist, non-Western Muslim response. Literary scholars of various stripes have tended to regard its sustained ambiguities and deliberately incomplete ending as a sign of its richness. However, this article intervenes to offer instead a nuanced critique of Hamid's...

Food is a significant element of culture. Culinary habits are culturally determined. Different communities and nationalities have their respective culinary choices and inhibitions. Further, culinary cultural differences become prominent in the case of the individuals in diaspora. In the basic, homeland – host nation paradigm, food assumes a defining role as cultural assimilation in diaspora, also demands culinary assimilation. An immigrant’s ethnic cultural identity is also defined by the culinary practices. Further, food also is linked with psych-sociology as Roland Barthes observes. This pap...

ABSTRACT In Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), the concept of identity comes undone because the narrator-protagonist, confronted with his lack of belonging, resorts to role-playing as a means of feeling whole. Undertaken in order to heal the self, role-playing plays out in the sense of playacting and responsibility. Although critics have commented on the novel’s deconstruction of belonging, the dual sense of role-playing has not been analysed in terms of how it affects the selflessness responsibility involves. This paper explores the text’s implication of responsibility in pla...

In the wake of 9/11, American fiction as well as the domains of the country's politics and media became permeated with binaries of us and them, self and the other. Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist challenges these notions and explores the questions of home and belonging, identification, the politics of belonging, and the constructions of boundaries. Similar to the discourse of postcolonial novels that are mainly concerned with writing back the margins to the center, The Reluctant Fundamentalist sheds light on the relegated matters related to the identity formation, power dynamics, b...

This essay explores how The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid offers a potential cosmopolitan antidote to the myths of American nationalism which allow the United States to pursue self-inter ...

Abstract Mohsin Hamid's novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2007, engages with the complex issues of Islam and the West, fundamentalism and America's War on Terror. As a “counterhistory” to post-9/11 Islamophobia, the novel contests common notions of terror as an unreasonable ideology of retribution and redemption by exposing the trajectories of imperialism. Analyzing The Reluctant Fundamentalist from the political perspective of a 9/11 novel, this paper aims to create counterintuitive rethinking on the Clash of Civilizations theory and to elucidate the...

After fourteen years of the September 11 attacks, the international political landscape is still occupied with suspicion, confrontation and distrust. This study intends to explore the trust deficit between east and west as depicted by Mohsin Hamid in his novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, and examine how far and how successfully he has portrayed the impact of 9/11 events on the Americans and the Muslims. By comparing the silent American (West) with Changez (East), Hamid has brilliantly discussed the relations between East and West. By revealing the conflicting viewpoints of th...

ABSTRACT For a novel consistently teetering on the brink of violence, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist begins in a surprisingly benign manner but ultimately offers a sustained interrogation of the possibilities and limits of hospitality in a time of terror. The novel is permeated by references to familiar forms of hospitality and their ultimate failure, yet this article focuses more specifically on the troubling implications The Reluctant Fundamentalist has for a philosophy of hospitality; that is, what appears as a failure of hospitality—the inevitable violence of the novel’s concl...

The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) traces the evolution of Changez’s sense of belonging by encompassing a substantial part of his life odyssey, ranging from his movement to the US for higher studies to his disillusionment and redirection of fundamental desires. This study explores those transformative stages that help shape his identity. For this purpose, James Marcia’s theory of identity achievement has been used as a theoretical framework. Marcia (1980) contends that certain situations and events (called ‘crises’) act as catalysts to prompt identity moratorium. The internal conflict caused ...

Background: Given the disciplinary background, it is unsurprising to state that the fictional portrayals incorporate real or invented settings for the characters in order to characterize a theme at hand. It can be argued that all or any reading of literature encompasses spatial dimension in the form of setting. And, literary places can have the shaping influences on the characters in texts. Although seemingly irrational, characters’ attachments to places invite us to rethink about the tyranny and/or privilege of places. Methods:  Informed by Foucauldian notion of utopias, heterotopias, and geo...

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 act...

Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist has attracted wide public attention for its interrogation of the event of 9 /11. The paper analyzes the writing strategies in The Reluctant Fundamentalist from the perspective of the cultural trauma theory and reveals that Hamid transgresses the experience of the 9 /11 attack itself by representing the individual psychological trauma in the post-9 /11 context and constructing it as cultural trauma. It argues that Hamid shows a deep sense of social responsibility and historical mission by way of exploring the root causes of 9 /11 and the War on Terror...

У статті проаналізовано роман сучасного британсько-пакистанського письменника Мохсіна Хаміда «Названий фундаменталістом». Основна увага зосереджена на політичному та ідеологічному дискурсі твору. Теоретичну базу дослідження становить праця Майкла Гардта та Антоніо Негрі «Імперія», у якій розгорнуто думку про особливості сучасного типу імперії. У статті зіставлена теорія щодо імперії ХХІ ст. і розмисли автора роману. Твір є своєрідною відповіддю-рефлексією на події 9/11 в США, де задекларована думка про те, що порушення комунікативного акту між Сходом і Заходом спричинило бомбардування Світовог...

This article explores the theme of cultural crossroads in Mohsin Hamid ’ s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist . Through an analysis of protagonist Changez ’ s journey, the study examines the complexities of identity negotiation and cultural hybridity in the context of globalization. Drawing on literary reviews and critical analyses, the research highlights how Hamid portrays Changez ’ s struggle with not being assimilated and his evolving sense of self amidst shifting socio-political landscapes. The findings reveal the novel ’ s multifaceted depiction of cultural identity amidst post-9/11 tens...

: The debate on Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist has, over the years, built what Stanley Fish calls an “interpretive community” which dictates how a work should be read and discussed. The quite tedious yet all-pervading claim that Hamid, in his novels, concerns himself with globalization, economy, neoliberalism, politics, multiculturalism, identity, and whatnot is today so fashionably common among Hamid critics that it feels like this is all what Hamid’s literature has to offer. This article engages in a critical discussion with Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and its critics a...

This paper highlights the variant aspects of what we may call the reluctance of fundamentalism and liberalism in post-postcolonial contemporary Pakistani literature in English, analyzing comparatively both exclusive and inclusive elements of its extensive canvas. This research project began with curiosity regarding an element of reluctance between two characters of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The two main characters of the novel, Changez and an unnamed American visitor represent allegiances to two different schools of thought: Changez to fundamentalism and the American to...

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid is examined in this research using a postcolonialist perspective. The study aims to examine the major characters from the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist within the context of postcolonial theory, taking into consideration the influences of racism, identity, and otherness on Changez and Ander's personalities. The study chooses a qualitative methodology and examines the different characters in the book, including Oona's mother, Eric, and Ander's father, using the descriptive analytical technique. This study has carefully examined and cited the wor...

This article examines the novels The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) by Mohsin Hamid and Burnt Shadows (2009) by Kamila Shamsie as significant examples of Pakistani writing in English after 9/11. Popular American discourse has remained mostly concerned with the cultural peculiarities of non-western and Islamic cultures such as those of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, especially as they coalesce in the figure of the terrorist. Thus, in the reevaluation of feeling, memory, and history prompted by 9/11, the multiple and shifting notions of the “other” now converge to form a singular threat. This...

Abstract:Western fiction about the 9/11 attacks tends to center white American experiences and perspectives and reinforce dominant Western stereotypes and misconceptions about Muslims, especially Muslim men. Counter-discursive post-9/11 fiction from a Muslim cosmopolitan perspective that seeks to intervene in these modes of representation inevitably has to contend with globally dominant epistemological frameworks of suspicion. While Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is among the most well-known of such counter-discursive fictions, this article focuses on H. M. Naqvi’s less wel...

Following the 9/11 attacks, it was said that all Americans and those in the West underwent a cultural shock. White people's sorrow and pain were used to maintain a regressive concept about Muslims, as fear of the unknown arose and surrounded them. The succession of violence meted out on vulnerable people of colour (POC), especially those belonging to a faith affiliated with Islamist terrorist groups, is explained by their purposeful removal from an ideologically created collective imagination. Trauma of the minority did not figure in the mainstream concerns of Western society. Every act of res...

This essay will present a postcolonial study of how Eastern identity and Western identity clash in The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, the PakistaniAmerican novelist, and make the character of the protagonist a glocal one, (A mixture of global and local), a term newly coined by Postcolonial scholars to show the ever clashing mixture of global and local dualities in immigrants’ personalities. The basis for this research paper is the postcolonial theories of Edward Said, Fanon and Homi K. Bhabha. The aim is to question simply and sardonically the human cost of empire building, moreover...

This paper is aimed at discussing Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist in the postmodern and postcolonial scene in order to explore the ways in which Hamid’s exploration of cultural hybridity reshapes the complex identity politics as a mutable, fluctuating and dynamic process in-between world that works to dismantle the literary horizon of the essentialized fundamentalist ‘Otherness’. In this novel, the main character Changez is a Pakistani Muslim who has ever studied and resided in the United States and has great expectations of acquiring a successful career in the corporate worl...

The September 11 attacks were world-changing events. Contemporary historians divide the history of the modern world into pre- and post-9/11. The metropolitan reaction was controversial. The Metropolis united against what is dubbed "the axis of evil." It attacked an array of Islamic nations. Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) portrayed two Muslim expatriates from Pakistan and Afghanistan who experienced post-9/11 America firsthand. The protagonists presented two distinct understandings of extremism and fundamentalism. This article emp...

Les attentats du 11 septembre 2001 ont eu des conséquences géopolitique, sociale, juridique et politique importantes, en premier lieu aux États-Unis ; mais ils ont aussi suscité des réactions littéraires. Cet article constitue une vignette qui présente et interroge la façon dont Mohsin Hamid joue avec le thème de la radicalisation idéologique dans son roman The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). On y analysera comment l’auteur travaille des discours et des représentations convenues du terrorisme et de la radicalisation afin de piéger le lecteur, et lui présenter un miroir de sa propre radicalité...