Troublesome Minorities: Questioning Assimilation in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Home Fire

Abstract

Cultural discourse has long proposed assimilation as the method for the successful social and political incorporation of immigrant populations in the West. The model minority myth is perpetuated as a success story of the immigrant (particularly the Asian immigrant) achieving the American Dream, of finding success through hard work and trademark American determination, while marketing the perceived silence and patience of the minority as honorable traits. However, these ideals are insufficient and problematic as they ignore the challenges immigrants and their descendants face in the post-9/11 era and promote deep set notions of race and associated categories. In order to better understand the incorporation of immigrant communities in the new century, we need to deconstruct and reevaluate the collective memory of mainstream western societies for their own myths of cultural and hegemonic superiority. We must study these societies as ethnic, as equally rooted in tradition as immigrant communities are accused of, and then a step towards a new, more just vision of adaptation must be taken. Exploring English literature, specifically works by South Asian Muslim writers on the post-9/11 western diaspora, reveals a more "humanist" understanding of these communities. Considering novels like The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Home Fire alongside theoretical works such as Orientalism by Edward Said, White by Richard Dyer, and Omi and Winant's racial formation theory offers a much more nuanced 1 Choudary: Troublesome Minorities: Questioning Assimilation in The Reluctant Published by JHU Macksey Journal, 2020 discussion on the racialization of Muslims after 9/11 through policing and surveillance, and the resulting isolation of the community into fundamentalisms and binaries.