Transcultural hospitality in postcolonial diasporic 9/11 novels

Abstract

Postcolonial diasporic novels on the subject of 9/11 have come up in response to the novels on the events of September 11, 2001 by the mainstream white American writers. Instead of addressing the trauma of the victims, the white American writers, as the review of the critical responses to their literature (in chapter 2) shows, engage in profiling Muslims and other immigrants as terrorists. Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (2004), Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2005) and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) respond to the prose of profiling them through an emphasis on transcultural hospitality. This research critically engages with postcolonial response to 9/11. The postcolonial diasporic novels present a counter-discourse to the profiling of Muslims as terrorists. This study assumes that a new post-9/11 ethics, which emphasizes on transcultural hospitality, comes out as an anti-dote to the discourse of Muslims profiling. In other words, the dissertation has attempted to explore how postcolonial, diasporic 9/11 novels embrace the ethics of transculturalism. Such ethics in the selected novels, as the dissertation shows, comes out as a striking counter to the discourse of cultural trauma in the mainstream American fictional representations of 9/11. However, cultural trauma is not the focus of this research. Discussion of cultural trauma is limited to the review of the mainstream writings on 9/11. The dissertation incorporates various scholarly reviews made on 9/11 writings, and also on trauma and violence based on 9/11 literature. The objectives are threefold: first to show, through the review of literature, how us versus them binary has been found to have contaminated 9/11 trauma discourse in the mainstream American literature; second to explore, through comprehensive analysis of the aforesaid novels, how South Asian diasporic postcolonial novels subvert the language of otherness; and third to argue that these texts, instead, stress on transcultural living and hospitality to the other. The dissertation has been organized in eight chapters. While the first chapter introduces issues, areas of the research in order to build up major argument and design of the dissertation; the second chapter surveys of previous scholarships based on the review of the literature on 9/11. And the third chapter analyzes relevant theories essential for textual analysis. The fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh chapters focus on textual analysis of Ali’s Brick Lane, Kunzru’s Transmission, Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, and Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist respectively. Finally, the eighth chapter incorporates four novels’ reflection placing the selected novels in reverse order first. Second, it highlights significance of proven facts in normal order. Third, it connects primary texts with methodology placing primary texts again in reverse order. Fourth, it specifies the findings based on set objectives. Fifth, it focuses on contribution to new knowledge along with research gap and also specifies limitation, and sixth, it ends with recommendations for further research. An application of the theoretical framework of transcultural hospitality to the above novels reveal their understanding of shared intimacy, new world order of glocalization, and end of both racial stereotyping and fakeness. Through these novels, these four writers condemn conditional hospitality of the westerners, uncanny exposition of the so-called globalism, and multiculturalism. They also expose western world’s fakeness and its transmission through media, vulnerable positioning of autoimmunity and deep-seated racism