Performative Subalternity and Positionality in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Abstract

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 the performative subaltern. Hamid provides insights into the repercussions of marginalisation to show how it sabotages the possibility of a cosmopolitan existence. Once moving into the position of the performative subaltern, Changez becomes the victim of growing Islamophobia in the US. The novel demonstrates how politics and cultural awareness affect not only one’s conceptualisation of race, but how racial and religious identity hinders one’s ability
to become an acculturated immigrant. Changez represents this shift from a pre9/11 to a post-9/11 world, in which racism acts as a politics of exclusion. Changez’s positionality, in the novel and in the world, directly influences how he performs as a subaltern: either to consent or radicalise. In post-9/11 America, Changez faces ostracisation as other; however, when he leaves the US to become a university professor in Pakistan, he twists Spivak’s subaltern principle (that underprivileged, disadvantaged segments in society have no voice for change) by developing a political voice of protest, but only after he moves beyond the borders of the United States.

Keywords: Islam, marginalisation, subaltern, performance, trauma