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Document Type

Article

Abstract

South Asian diasporic fiction has been widely celebrated for its representation of culturally hybrid characters that challenge fixed conceptions of ethnic and racial identity. Two recent novels by Pakistani diasporic writers, however, expose the political limits of discourses of cultural hybridity following the events of 9/11. This paper explores 9/11 as a seminal event in the representation of South Asian diasporic identity in H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy and Moshin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It proposes that following 9/11 the marginality of Pakistani diasporic identity is more profitably read in light of a precursor to the hybrid - the figure of the Tragic Mulatto. Like the Tragic Mulatto, the protagonists of these novels examine the complexities surrounding interrelated identities of race and national allegiance, in which biological explanations of racial otherness have been reconfigured through various (mis) representations of Islam. As with the convention of the Tragic Mulatto, Naqvi and Hamid’s Pakistani diasporic protagonists’ attempts to "pass" in mainstream American society, but are "unmasked" in their respective narratives as their "Muslimness" is exposed in the wake of 9/11. The injustice of effects of 9/11 on the lives of these characters rests upon their inability to continue privileged, mainstream American lives, recalling the pathos that the figure of the Tragic Mulatto sought to engender in its nineteenth century audience. Such pathos is questionable politically, because it creates sympathy for the secular, westernized Muslim that has been stigmatized following 9/11, but leaves the broader political relations between America and the "Muslim world" unquestioned.

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