Top Research Papers on The Reluctant Fundamentalist PDF

This article centers on Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and explores the challenges of reciprocal recognition and the impact of power dynamics on trust between the West and Muslim communities in post 9/11 America. Bart Moore-Gilbert's critique of existing models of recognition politics; specifically, models developed by Fukuyama and Taylor, reveals the limitations in addressing the Muslim experience and Islamic fundamentalism within western liberal-democratic societies. The failure of ocular-centric approaches – prevalent in the western tradition – to adequately represent th...

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid is examined in this research using a postcolonialist perspective. The study aims to examine the major characters from the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist within the context of postcolonial theory, taking into consideration the influences of racism, identity, and otherness on Changez and Ander's personalities. The study chooses a qualitative methodology and examines the different characters in the book, including Oona's mother, Eric, and Ander's father, using the descriptive analytical technique. This study has carefully examined and cited the wor...

This research paper aims at soft power in the novel “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” by Mohsin Hamid. It throws light on the character of Changez, who becomes a victim of soft power of American culture and its policies. Changez is a brilliant student but he strongly supports American culture and tries to become part of it. This research qualitatively analyzes the text of “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” and highlights those events which reveal that America tries to influence Changez. This research follows close reading of the novel. America has strong influence on his mind but it will never accept...

For some time we have witnessed the emergence of a generation of "postcolonial" writers for whom (post)colonialism has become an increasingly distant family memory. They understandably find it rather tedious to be read first and foremost as representative of a certain cultural and national context. In contrast to this, Pakistani writer Mohsin Hamid appears to willingly accept the ambitious task of "explaining" his country to his readers. Meanwhile it seems that at least Western audiences continue to be in desperate need of such explanation, given the limited knowledge about other parts of the ...

This study intends to explore the ideology of the West in The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid who successfully portrayed the impact of 9/11 to view the ideology of the West for the East (Muslims). Edward Said’s Orientalism is an idea that represents views of the West about the East that fails to understand the cultural differences and perceives the East as biased, and subvert being opposed to reality. This idea of the West is rooted in the history of colonization and racism. The study follows qualitative research in the literary work of The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid thr...

The most influential theorists of multiculturalism and interculturalism have attempted a rigorous re-examination of their proposals, as demonstrated by recent publications such as “Interculturalism versus multiculturalism –The Cantle-Modood debate” (2015) and Multiculturalism and Interculturalism: Debating the Dividing Lines (2016). Both Ted Cantle and Tariq Modood have acknowledged the need to revise the concepts of interculturalism and multiculturalism as a response to the rapidly changing circumstances of contemporary societies. This paper seeks to: briefly review recent assessments of inte...

Silencing the Other: The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a Counter Discourse "Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard. I am a lover of America..." So speaks the mysterious Pakistani at a Lahore cafe as the dark settles, seeming to invite the reader to sip tea with them as he/she reads absorbed in his ironic "conversation" with his unnamed American guest. We are living in an era of constant exposure to one-sided discourses in every single phase of our lives through various forms of media. This is such an exposure that on one hand, w...

This research paper applies systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to analyze the transitivity patterns of Changez’s character in Mohsin Hamid’s novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The study aims to examine how Changez’s transitivity patterns evolve and shift over the course of the narrative, particularly in relation to his changing ideological stance and identity. Using Halliday’s SFL framework, the analysis reveals that Changez’s transitivity patterns reflect his evolving agency, worldview, and social positioning. The findings also suggest that Changez’s linguistic choices are not merely...

Abstract:This essay identifies ruins as the arch-geography of terror in Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The aesthetics of the literary trope of ruins locates the middle-class protagonist Changez’s terror not in destruction but in his recognition of the subcutaneous violence of liberal meritocracy and decaying grandeur. At a time when conventional ways of knowing colonial violence have settled into stagnant critiques, ruins highlight the need to indict the violence manifest in individualism and intimacy, affirmative forces that usually appear beyond reproach. The interweaving...

In contrast to others who have read Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist exclusively as a political novel, I argue that the novel’s most significant contribution to the body of post-9/11 literature is formal in nature. The novel indeed mobilizes political issues, but it achieves this by creating a series of allegories that centre on various forms of travel connected to the terrorism hinted at in the term “fundamentalist” in the title. These allegories, which I examine in the first part of this article, revolve around the interactions between the protagonist and those he encounters as he...

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid sparks a debate on liberal humanism, and its repercussion during post-9/11 throws Neo-Orientalism and Islamic terrorism into question—recounted by Hamid. The novel mirrors all aspects of humanism and liberal intellection as a cultural product of humanism in the West. Hamid’s sensibilities of the fluctuant Western paradigm opposing immigrants, fundamentalism, and terrorism during post-9/11 is depicted from the protagonist’s perspective. The Reluctant Fundamentalist is invigorated in a threshold world of multiple borders—of characters and cultures—by ...

This article explores the theme of cultural crossroads in Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Through an analysis of protagonist Changez’s journey, the study examines the complexities of identity negotiation and cultural hybridity in the context of globalization. Drawing on literary reviews and critical analyses, the research highlights how Hamid portrays Changez’s struggle with not being assimilated and his evolving sense of self amidst shifting socio-political landscapes. The findings reveal the novel’s multifaceted depiction of cultural identity amidst post-9/11 tensions, she...

This study examines the thematic intersections of identity, belonging, and alienation in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, situating the protagonist, Changez, within the broader socio-political landscape of post-9/11 America. Through a critical analysis of Changez's trajectory from an aspiring immigrant embodying the ideals of the American Dream to a disillusioned critic disavowing its tenets. this paper interrogates the processes of systemic othering and cultural exclusion exacerbated by the post-9/11 "War on Terror." The research recontextualises the concept of "fundamentalism," m...

The Reluctant Fundamentalist offers a more recent and contemporary portrayal of  9/11 fiction. This thesis uses postcolonial theory to analyze Mohsin Hamid’s novel, published in 2007. The novel chronicles the protagonist Changez’s life before, during, and after the 9/11 and how his view of America’s capitalism and imperialism-centered society and his identity shifts in the wake of the attacks. It is allegories to display identity and has frequently been used in post-colonial discourse to mean simply cross-cultural 'exchange' to the Pakistani immigrant named Changez Khan in the novel. The novel...

At a time when global interdependence has become our destiny more than ever, empathy and the ability to empathize have been increasingly praised as skills necessary for better social and political interactions. However, as the studies on international politics of emotion to empathy have argued, empathy is culturally and historically contingent and its productive possibilities might be limited by differentials of power. The present paper engages the politics of empathy with a focus on Muhsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a transnational text to show problems on the way of empathetic e...

The purpose of this study is to investigate Mohsin Hamid’s novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by utilizing the theory of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. The study, a theoretical construct founded on two key concepts from Bourdieu’s theory, namely habitus and field, aims at offering a new perspective to understand the dilemma of the protagonist Changez from a sociological cultural perspective. It shows how Changez cultivates his habitus to pursue a specific taste in America through multiple forms of cultural capital and manifests how these forms shape his attitudes and relations. It al...

ABSTRACT In a time when truth and values are under assault, Mira Nair’s 2012 political thriller The Reluctant Fundamentalist gives new meaning to the current situation. It describes a young Pakistani man, Changez, who leaves his home (and soul) behind to pursue the American dream. He attains a high position with a big corporation that acquires failing businesses. In the course of his work a business owner reminds Changez (meaning change) of all he left behind—traditional values, his father’s poetry, a loving family, and his native religion. He gives up his American success and returns home whe...

Globalization is one of the most discussed issues as a mobility which has world-wide effects nearly on all of the world nations. As soon as globalization has emerged and been discussed for several decades, local cultures and creole cultures have also been studied as a result of controversies on interaction between globalization and localization. Mohsin Hamid’s fiction can be examined through the global and local cultures which cannot be separated from identities of individuals and cities that seem to be the basic carriers of cultural values. In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, he deals with the c...

This paper analyzes Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist that demonstrates Changez's intercultural relations with non-Muslim characters such as Erica, her father, his co-workers at Underwood Samson. The non-Muslim employees at Underwood Samson suspect Changez because of his beard as the American society has a mindset of beard. Erica‒Changez's beloved, and her father stereotype Changez based on his dress and beard. The beard reminds Americans of the 9/11 perpetrators. Their suspicion leads to detachment between Changez and non-Muslim characters in the aftermath. I employ John W. Berry's ...

Literature has always been considered as the reflection of human life because of its involvement with human behavior, thoughts, activity, development, progress, etc. Sometimes while reading a literary text, readers often face complicated characters that are quite troublesome and create difficulty to understand but at the same time, these characters generate curiosity in the mind of the readers to know more about them. Such a character is Changez from the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. This article aims to explain the behavior of Changez, the protagonist of the novel The Reluctant Fundamen...

America was founded on the idea of the melting pot that guarantees success, an opportunity to prosperity and social upward regardless of race, religion or status at birth. After the events of 9/11, the idealized notion of the melting pot was abandoned. Therefore, another version of America initiates fueled by post-9/11 xenophobia and President Bush administration’s “war on terror” launched on the pretext of promoting democracy. The Bush Doctrine, however, represented terrorism as a cause rather than an effect of the long history of Western colonization, oppression and manipulation of the Musli...

ABSTRACT As noted by critics, sexual intimacy in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist emerges as an allegory of post–9/11 tensions. A prominent feature of the allegory is the depiction of healing as an opening for sexual intimacy. This paper demonstrates the invasiveness that healing acquires on account of the 9/11 novel’s interweaving of intimacy and terror. The focus of this paper lies on the two instances of love–making, in which injuries are put to work in ways that expose how healing potentially trespasses on the inaccessibility of others. The text’s arming of healing, which has hi...

Belonging is depicted as ethically transgressive in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which deconstructs belonging (as in a state of ownership) to the self’s longing (be longing) for what is eternally elusive or other about itself. Hamid’s novel demonstrates that this longing implicates the self in sacrificial violence against others. The collusive link between longing and violence in the novel is discussed in this paper with reference to Jacques Derrida’s The Gift of Death, which argues that responsibility to the other is contingent on the sacrificial violence of love.

Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist responds tentatively to the question Judith Butler posed in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks: ‘is there something to be gained from grieving, from tarrying with grief?’ (Butler 2004: xii). Drawing on recent theorisations of precarity by Butler and Isabell Lorey, this paper argues that in this novel Hamid proposes an ethico-political theory of grief that refuses to conform to existing modes of post-9/11 mourning. This model does not stoke nationalist fervour, or reiterate exceptional circumstances of trauma, but instead advocates a continuous engagem...

The present paper deals with the “Theory of intert extuality in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and the W hite Tiger It deals with some of the narrative principles whic h are required to take an account of how a theme or st ry is organized. In this article the complex phenomenon of the theor y of intertextuality is focused on in detail. The f ocus has been on when and why the speaker or writer feels the need to rel ate the other text, how they are interrelated to si gnify new messages in response to new situations and new positions and fi nally how they intensify the meaning and affect the reader...

The present article deals that bilingualism is when two languages to come into contact. It focuses on the doctrines which are required to take an account of how people mix language in creative writings. It encompasses the complex phenomenon of the Nativization and Englishization which is studied in some details. The present study aims to analyze and categorize in terms of different processes involved in Nativization. The focus is on when and why the speaker or writer feels the need to mix lexical items and linguistic features of two different languages in a sentence, how a speaker handles thes...

The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a postcolonial novel that, in this essay, is argued to challenge and question the colonial stereotypes which came into greater focus after 9/11 in America. The chall ...

'What is the purpose of your trip to the United States?' she asked me.'I live here,' I replied.'That is not what I asked you, sir,' she said.- Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant FundamentalistAs a response to socio-political developments in the US and its global actions since September 11, 2001, a number of new and established authors from Muslim backgrounds - such as Mohsin Hamid, Michael Muhammad Knight, Khaled Hosseini, and Mohja Kahf - have reviewed American civic life through the lens of social imaginaries of a heterogeneous minority whose very identity has been under critical scrutiny since the...

The paper will focus on the pulsations of estrangement in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist that the central character and narrator Changez goes through in America while working as an employee at Underwood Samson, a “valuation” firm and his subsequent return to his native Pakistan where he assumes what appears to be an ultra-nationalistic political stance. The Reluctant Fundamentalist offers an authoritative account by a self-styled insider of Muslim resentment of America and a seething commentary on America’s reputation in the non-western world. It is an act of courage that tells us...

Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist offers a new and innovative framework through which post-9/11 Eastern/Western relationships and prejudices can be re-examined. By avoiding the ‘mimetic’ quality of many literary works written in the Western tradition, Hamid succeeds in radically displacing and dispelling assumptions regarding these cultural interactions. In so doing, the narrative forces the creation of a nascent understanding not limited by previous preconceptions even as the precise content and objectives of this remain elusive and open to debate. Political and literary ...

This article considers the role of the reader-as-judge in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It builds upon and extends the idea of the cathartic function of authorship as a response to trauma by alternatively considering the activation and empowerment of the reader that is enabled by the dramatic monologue style of Hamid’s novella. Indications that the reader is called upon to make active decisions can be found in the second-person address that is directed beyond the pages. The layering of different genres also means that readers have to choose what they believe to be the most suita...

ABSTRACT Drawing on scholarship on racial melancholia and food studies, this article traces the melancholic appetites manifested in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and examines how alimentary desires stand in for the consumptive desires of the US nation state in relation to the model minority as well as the recuperative mourning undertaken by the protagonist Changez upon his return to Pakistan. A double encounter with Lahori cuisine and melancholic testimony in the novel pushes the American interlocutor towards acknowledging a political responsibility for the consequences of US act...

This paper highlights the variant aspects of what we may call the reluctance of fundamentalism and liberalism in post-postcolonial contemporary Pakistani literature in English, analyzing comparatively both exclusive and inclusive elements of its extensive canvas. This research project began with curiosity regarding an element of reluctance between two characters of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The two main characters of the novel, Changez and an unnamed American visitor represent allegiances to two different schools of thought: Changez to fundamentalism and the American to...

: The debate on Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist has, over the years, built what Stanley Fish calls an “interpretive community” which dictates how a work should be read and discussed. The quite tedious yet all-pervading claim that Hamid, in his novels, concerns himself with globalization, economy, neoliberalism, politics, multiculturalism, identity, and whatnot is today so fashionably common among Hamid critics that it feels like this is all what Hamid’s literature has to offer. This article engages in a critical discussion with Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and its critics a...

Abstract: This essay explores the viability of developing non- dualistic identities in a globalized world that imposes neo- imperialistic hierarchies like old/new, east/west, oppressed/oppressor, and terrorist/terrorized. Incorporating theories of the contact zone, translocality, and contemporary coloniality, I analyze how Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) blurs the division between past and present and shows how seemingly distant spaces like Pakistan, the United States, and Chile are all connected. Although it has often been interpreted as a post-9/11 novel, The Reluctant Fun...

This paper underscores the existential status of the immigrants in the United States of America as portrayed in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist written as a response to the 9/11 attacks occurred on 11 September 2001. In the post-9/11 situation, the identity of Pakistani immigrants is more at risk than before because of the perpetrators’ religious identity as widely perceived to be extreme. Being Pakistani means being part of a society divided into different groups that are at odds with each other over religious, sectarian and political issues. In such a situation, where Pakistan do...

This study tries to examine lack of identity, ambiguity and ambivalence. The Pakistanis identity is progressively jeopardized after 9/11 state than it was ever previously. It is clear that the Pakistanis allocated to different groups at war with each other on political, spiritual and sectional issues. The paper sheds light on the main character, Changez for being strong and not being influenced by crucial situations he encountered. Hamid tries to show the real face of American after 9/11 events and how they quickly attribute false propaganda against Muslims. To have one sole national personali...

The Submission and The Reluctant Fundamentalist invest in the strategic ambivalence that characterizes heterotopias. Steering away from trauma studies I concentrated on the possibilities the concept of heterotopia offers to understanding the multilayered content and symbolism of the two post 9/11 novels. Heterotopia as a Foucauldian concept established spaces that are ‘other’ in relation to a normal space. I extend that other space to include Muslims as belonging to a heterotopic garden from which they challenge an Islamophobic and divisive discourse that is affiliated to power and uses the po...

This paper aims at investigating the nostalgic impact on the characters in The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid. Nostalgia is regarded as the state of homesick or a mental sentimentality for one's past. Everyone is more or less nostalgic, and nostalgia plays a vital role in the lives and experiences of individuals in daily life. The present study is a qualitative and descriptive textual analysis. The Reluctant Fundamentalist has been examined by analyzing the words, sentences, characters and their actions from the nostalgic point of view. This study has investigated the nostalgic impac...

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 t...

The author reads from, discusses and responds to questions about his novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a narrative concerning the psychological consequences of the events of 9/11 for a young Pakistani man working in corporate America. Themes of nostalgia, alienation and distrust are explored, as well as the role that literature can play in sustaining ambivalence.

Moshin Harmid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist narrates how Muslin Americans encounter their difficult situation in America after the 9/11 incident. Changez, the protagonist, deals with his hybrid identity in the neoliberal American society, and reacts to his impediments after the 9/11 incident when the American society abjects his Islamic otherness. I propose there are two parallel but paradoxical forces interacting with each other to deconstruct and reconstruct Changez’s oscillating identities. One is the system of the delivering others (in David, Palumbo-Liu’s term), which functions according...

Mohsin Hamid is a Pakistani novelist who holds British citizenship. He is the author of Moth Smoke (2000) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). Hamid's first novel was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway award, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist became an international best seller. It was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. The Guardian selected it as one of the books "that defined the decade" ("What We Were Reading"). The story of an ambitious Pakistani immigrant disenchanted with American life after 9/11, The Reluc...

One of the central themes of the multicultural debate is liberalism’s incompatibility with some cultural identities.  Recent criticism has attributed this problem to the tendency of multiculturalists to adopt fixed identities rooted in uncritical notions of race, religion, or nation that clash with liberalism.  Bharati Mukerjee’s Jasmine and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist pose the opposite problem: what happens when a dominant culture seeks to impose a fixed identity on a person who seeks identity through liberal principles?  Both protagonists pursue identity in a globalized Post ...

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography ...

Abstract:This article examines the implications of particular representational and narrative strategies that postcolonial writers, especially from Muslim-majority nations, can utilize to respond to 9/11 and its aftermath. Mohsin Hamid's novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist has been hailed as the paradigmatic counter-discursive, antiimperialist, non-Western Muslim response. Literary scholars of various stripes have tended to regard its sustained ambiguities and deliberately incomplete ending as a sign of its richness. However, this article intervenes to offer instead a nuanced critique of Hamid's...

Background: Given the disciplinary background, it is unsurprising to state that the fictional portrayals incorporate real or invented settings for the characters in order to characterize a theme at hand. It can be argued that all or any reading of literature encompasses spatial dimension in the form of setting. And, literary places can have the shaping influences on the characters in texts. Although seemingly irrational, characters’ attachments to places invite us to rethink about the tyranny and/or privilege of places. Methods:  Informed by Foucauldian notion of utopias, heterotopias, and geo...

Food is a significant element of culture. Culinary habits are culturally determined. Different communities and nationalities have their respective culinary choices and inhibitions. Further, culinary cultural differences become prominent in the case of the individuals in diaspora. In the basic, homeland – host nation paradigm, food assumes a defining role as cultural assimilation in diaspora, also demands culinary assimilation. An immigrant’s ethnic cultural identity is also defined by the culinary practices. Further, food also is linked with psych-sociology as Roland Barthes observes. This pap...

In the wake of 9/11, American fiction as well as the domains of the country's politics and media became permeated with binaries of us and them, self and the other. Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist challenges these notions and explores the questions of home and belonging, identification, the politics of belonging, and the constructions of boundaries. Similar to the discourse of postcolonial novels that are mainly concerned with writing back the margins to the center, The Reluctant Fundamentalist sheds light on the relegated matters related to the identity formation, power dynamics, b...

ABSTRACT In Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), the concept of identity comes undone because the narrator-protagonist, confronted with his lack of belonging, resorts to role-playing as a means of feeling whole. Undertaken in order to heal the self, role-playing plays out in the sense of playacting and responsibility. Although critics have commented on the novel’s deconstruction of belonging, the dual sense of role-playing has not been analysed in terms of how it affects the selflessness responsibility involves. This paper explores the text’s implication of responsibility in pla...