Delphine Munos

Possessed by Whiteness: Interracial Affiliations and Racial Melancholia in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Drawing on whiteness studies and psychoanalytical theory, this article explores representations of interracial relationships as a means to claim and/or contest the ideal of whiteness in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In Hamid’s novel, the 9/11 attacks trigger a crisis in self-identification for model-minority Pakistani protagonist Changez, which proves illuminating in terms of the invisible racial subjugation exerted so far upon him by Jim, Changez’s passport into the corporate world, and by Erica, his (white) lifeline to exclusive Manhattan. The article focuses on the ways in which Hamid uses the post-9/11 context to reveal the racial melancholia surreptitiously informing today’s “new” versions of the American Dream, which is apparent in Changez’s and Erica’s relationship as well as in their parallel impossible mourning of the broken mirror of “white” Am/Erica. Emphasizing the extent to which whiteness and racial melancholia permeate the discourse of assimilation, Hamid’s book rewrites the “new” American Dream as what Anne Anlin Cheng has called a “fantasy built on absences”.

Mapping diasporic subjectivities

Our understanding of the complex heterogeneity of the South Asian diaspora can only be enriched by inputs from across disciplines. This special issue aims to foreground the potential of literary and cultural narratives to allow for a critical understanding of the dynamics of diverse diaspora formations. While social scientists offer perspectives into the political, economic, and demographic aspects and conditions of migration, the literary theorist engages with the creative handling of issues of migration, thereby offering more personal insights into the individual world of the migrant, and its connection with the larger collective. In their preface to Writing Across Worlds: Literature and Migration, King, Connell, and White suggest that the research agenda of the social sciences can be only enriched by creative writing which focuses on the realm of geo-cultural border crossings:

Introduction: race relations and the South Asian diasporic imaginary

ABSTRACT In today’s western multicultural societies, Eurocentric notions of ‘black’ and ‘white’ have polarised the debate about racial relations and effaced the complexities of interaction between South Asian migrant communities and people of other ethnic and racial backgrounds. This special issue is geared toward exploring how the complexity of contemporary race relations between the South Asian and the African communities, as well as its legacy in Africa, the Caribbean, and the India Ocean, find expression through literary and cultural narratives. Engaging with a variety of colonial and postcolonial contexts – namely Mauritius, South Africa, Bengal, Barbados, Kenya, and Trinidad – our contributors attempt to address gaps in the exploration of race relations from within the South Asian diasporic imaginary and to understand race relations in the context of British colonial-capitalist expansion and of its postcolonial and global inflections.

“Minor” genres in postcolonial literatures: New webs of meaning

It is now widely acknowledged that the field of postcolonial studies has been by and large averse to exploring aesthetic matters (see Boehmer 2010; Hiddleston 2011; Hitchcock 2003), save for discus...

We narration in Chang-rae Lee’s On such a full sea and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the attic: “Unnaturally” Asian American?

Abstract This essay looks at two recent Asian American texts written in the first-person plural – namely Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the attic (2011) and Chang-rae Lee’s On such a full sea (2014). Its main goal is to show that the ambiguities and tensions here generated by we narration prove particularly apt when it comes to calling into question essentialist views concerning the anatomy of community-building. But my contention is that these two we texts are particularly interesting at a theoretical level, too, in that they help us challenge the orthodoxies of traditional narrative theory – among which Gérard Genette’s all-too-rigid distinction between the homo- and heterodiegetic levels in a text, or the generalized assumption, which has been notably challenged by Mieke Bal, that every act of story-telling is necessarily indebted to ‘a’ narrator, and a narrator of anthropomorphic standards at that.