This paper offers a postcolonial reading of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). By examining this text, this paper , in particular, teases out the critical notions of national allegory (Jameson), Islamophobia (Allen), hybridity (Bhaba), and the colored and the oriental figure (Fanon and Said) which serve as an underlying conceptual model of postcolonial studies, studies that offer ‘counter-discursive strategies to the dominant discourse’ (Tiffin). This paper argues that Hamid’s representation of the progress of his protagonist Changez indicates an attempt to re-write the postcolonial narrative anew. We are introduced to a protagonist whose complex love and sexual relationship suggests the unsettled, intermittent and suspicious relation between the Orient and the Occident, re-emergence of historical anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic phenomena that lurk deep in the Western historical consciousness, subversion of the colonial hegemonic discourse by creating a hybrid character, and foregrounding the necessity of one’s transcendence of neo-colonial and imperial limitations.  

Title

أحمد قبها

Publisher

Zarqa Conference Proceedings

Publisher Country

Jordan

Publication Type

Prtinted only

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Year

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Pages

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