Abstract

This paper is aimed at discussing Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist in the postmodern and postcolonial scene in order to explore the ways in which Hamid’s exploration of cultural hybridity reshapes the complex identity politics as a mutable, fluctuating and dynamic process in-between world that works to dismantle the literary horizon of the essentialized fundamentalist ‘Otherness’. In this novel, the main character Changez is a Pakistani Muslim who has ever studied and resided in the United States and has great expectations of acquiring a successful career in the corporate world. Unfortunately, he is constantly trapped, to a different extent, in the crisis of identity politics whether in the pre-9/11 context or in the Post-9/11 attack which has been a crucial turning point of social, cultural and political transformation around the globe. In this sense, whenever he constantly feels alienated, misrepresented and misjudged in his adopted country, and torn apart between two cultures in terms of settings of juxtaposing Pakistan culture and American dominance. However, the objective existence of cultural difference and heterogeneity in every historic moment of transition consistently urges Changez to move beyond the essentialized and categorized identities, relocating and redefining his cultural identity as a dynamic process in liminal space, a world ‘in-between’, due to the transnationality and transculturality in the age of globalization, though cultural clash and confrontation might be unavoidable.

Key Words

Cultural hybridity, In-betweenness, Pakistani, Identity, Multiculturalism

Introduction

The issue of cultural identity has already become a crucial subject in cultural and literary studies. In a globalized world, not only is there filled with an increasing exchange, amalgam and integration among different cultures and ethnicities but also there are the growing possibilities of a clash among cultures and civilizations. Mohsin Hamid, a Pakistani writer, in his novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist problematized the issue of identity politics, to some extent in two different periods as Pre-9/11 and Post-9/11, considered as the continuously transformative and changing cultural, political and social factors. In addition, due to the great impact of postmodernism and of controversies over multiculturalism upon the general research on identity politics in the late 20th century, the debates over identity politics are provocatively problematized and continuously explored. Hamid makes out an eloquent and sympathetic story of the protagonist Changez’s search for the solutions to his ambivalent and fluctuating cultural identity politics when being visually located in an in-betweenness and liminal world, where Changez is confronted with the political dilemma of cultural identity as a displaced and alienated stranger in the context of American dominant culture as well as of debated multiculturalism. To this point, Harold Bloom (2009) points out that In Homi Bhabha’s view, hybridity is marked by the “in-betweenness,” the” interstitially,” caused by the continuous negation, negotiation and integration between the foreign and the familiar (Harold Bloom, 2009). This paper is mainly focused on exploring the ways in which Hamid’s inquiry of cultural hybridity reconfigures ethnicity as a mutable and dynamic field of intersections and permeations that functions to dismantle the literary us/them binary division. Therefore, to place this discussion of Hamid's novel into perspective, the articulation of Hamid’s cultural hybridity is needed to challenge this literary-premised horizon. 




Cultural Hybridity: Challenging Essentialized Identity 

To make the discussion of the cultural hybridity model as shown in Hamid's literary work into a rational viewpoint, a concise explanation of it, involved with a critical objection to this theoretical model, is more useful in highlighting how Hamid’s challenge to the essentialized cultural identity.

As Homi Bhabha (1994) writes, “the very concept of homogenous national cultures, the consensual or contiguous transmission of historical tradition, or ‘organic’ ethnic communities—as the ground of cultural comparativism---are in a profound process of redefinition” (p. 5), in this sense, Cultural hybridity is a challenging concept to properly redefine some dynamic and resilient terms such as identity, culture, nation and ethnicity in terms with their multiple meanings. Furthermore, Cultural hybridity indicates the concurrent presence of different segments and fragments, framed in "neither the one nor the other", signifying in-betweenness, negotiation and love-hate relationship, the agency predicted upon difference and heterogeneity. Harold Bloom points out that cultural Hybridity is generally regarded as “attempting to recognize the existence of cultural differences as well as the roles of invention and agency in the articulation of those differences” (2009, p.170). 

In addition, the conception of cultural hybridity plays an important role in expounding postcolonial theory as a highly debated term, commonly referring to “the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 2000, p. 108). This contact zone is a spatial form for the negation and negotiation, assimilation, integration and hybridization among cultures, nations and ethnicities, where new forms of cultural hybrid identity are produced. Hoogvelt (1997) assumes that cultural hybridity is considered a privileged and celebrated type of prominent cultural agency because of the consequent ability to negotiate the difference between cultures. 

 Thus, the theory of Cultural Hybridity formally appears as a paramount theoretical paradigm for elucidating the phenomenon of diasporic immigrants in Western countries of similar postcolonial settings, especially in the United States after Bhabha’s book Location of Culture (1994) was published. Bhabha attempts to make subversion of the essentialized identity formation based on the stereotyped and traditional assumption of the concept of biologically racialized or fixed ethnicity and nationality. As Marwan M. Kraidy (2002) points out that Bhabha’s conception of hybridity diverts away from its racialized implication to the semiotic register of culture to probe into cultural hybridity in the context of the postcolonial novel, praising it as the resilience of the subaltern and as the contamination used for imperial ideology, literature, aesthetics, and identity, by natives who fight back at imperialist predomination as well as reappropriate and subvert dominantly colonial discourses. 

Edward, W. S. (1994) Said initially argues in Orientalism that the oriental culture is assumed to exist contrary to the Western culture. However, Said’s later publication of Culture and Imperialism (1993) presents the concept of ‘voyage in’ to come up with the possibility of cultural hybridity in terms of its emphasis on the fluid and mutable field of permeations that serves to dissolve the categorical relationships between the colonized and the colonizers, as Said that it is “the conscious effort to enter into the discourse of Europe and the West, to mix with it and transform it, to make it acknowledge marginalized or suppressed or forgotten histories” (1993:261). 

Robert Young (2004) in his work White Mythologies has formulated a systematic investigation on the conception of hybridity, noting that the state of hybrid discourse is aimed at not only disrupting the colonial authority but advocating the local revolt against this authority. Another postmodern theorist Stuart Hall (1999) conducts a classical study on the agenda of cultural hybridity in the area of literary and cultural criticism., having argued that cultural identity does displace from some fixed origin to two 'framed' vectors: the vector of similarity and continuity and of rupture and difference. In a way, contextualized within the diasporic narrative of displacement and dislocation, the diasporic immigrants at the moment of their crossing borderline are conceptualized through the definition of heterogeneity and hybridity, not through essence or purity based on race, culture and ethnicity. 

Around the late 20th century, in recent research, the model of cultural hybridity is also manifest in some researchers probing into the cultural politics of citizenship. For instance, Werbner and Modood (1997) recommend an understanding that the political potential of cultural hybridity consists in the symbolically transgressive power to subvert binary oppositions and thus give rise to the conditions for cultural transformation and reflexivity on basis of legitimacy of difference and heterogeneity rather than on a coercive unity and essentialized nature. Therefore, the theory of cultural hybridity is critically explored to disintegrate the categorized and essentialized structure by dismantling the general notion of culture and identity as a static and essentialized force. 

However, the term ‘hybridity’ has been somehow criticized by some cultural theorists, who object to redefining transcultural experiences as a hybrid. For instance, firstly, to Ashcroft et al (1998) hybridity “usually implies negating and neglecting the imbalance and inequality of the power relation it references. By stressing the transformative cultural, linguistic and political impacts on both the colonized and the colonizers, it has been regarded as replicating assimilationist policy by masking or ‘whitewashing’ cultural differences” (p, 109). Secondly, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak  (1999) has expressed ideas against this type of 'hybridist triumphalism', which contributes to the all-encompassing concept of ‘cultural difference’ without sufficiently coping with specific cultural differences, or which is riddled with utopian expectations and outlook for the actual existence of global transcultural and transnational communities despite the obvious facts of stereotyped racial prejudices, cultural and legal biases and the system social hierarchies in the contemporary world.  Besides, Samuel P Huntington (1996), one of the main theorists of the cultural clash theory in his outstanding work The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order conducts a description of inharmony and incompatibility between civilizations or cultures, suggesting that residing in-between cultures are built upon the whole and fixed unity rather than the negotiated and hybridized fragments in terms of cultural heterogeneity. 

Another major problem pertinent to multiculturalism, which is a typical policy introduced in the 1960s in the United States of America, symbolizes the forsaking of monocultural American dominant ideology and acknowledges particularities of monolithic culture among ethnicities and nations. For this, Chang Yau HOON (2006) suggests that it would tend to categorize people into different monolithic, unified and homogenized cultural ‘groups' even if an individual might not intend to as such be identified. Apparently, the function of multiculturalism has been critically challenged by the concept of cultural hybridity in this postmodern and postcolonial scene. Notwithstanding the concept of cultural hybridity has its own limitedness and boundedness, many theorists argued in this contemporary age that the concept of cultural hybridity is an optimistic and helpful formulation, a radical subversion of binary structure in terms of cultural difference in postmodern and postcolonial discourse.

Further, associated with Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalism, which can be clearly considered one of the most influential Pakistani-American fiction after the 9/11 Attack, one contemporary Pakistani writer, obviously engaged with the postmodern articulation of identity and ethnicity, makes his commitment to the cultural hybridity model, which can be observed in his writing and its impact he expects. In reply to an interview about what he wants readers to acquire from his novel ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalism’, Hamid suggests that “it may not be what Changez may say about himself… he is someone who reflects on his mongrelizing identity as I think many people do.” (Harleen Singh, 2010, p.150). To this point, Bhabha (1994) adds that “cultures of postcolonial contra-modernity” also employ cultural hybridity at the moment of their border-crossing to imaginarily reappropriate, translate, and rewrite colonial discourse in the modern postcolonial scene.

In his novel, Hamid critically represents a provocative and radical formulation about reinscribing ethnicity and identity. This paper will begin with discussing Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, in order to probe into the ways in which his critical exploration of cultural hybridity reconfigures the complex identity politics of Pakistani-American as a dynamic and mutable field of permeations, intersection and hybridization that serves to disintegrate the literary visions of essentialized and fixed ‘Otherness’.

Reconstruction of Cultural Identity: Struggle for ‘Beyond’

From Bhabha’s point of view, the term ‘beyond’ is a transitory and in-between site of transformation, ss John McLeod (2012) states, is frequently depicted in terms which put emphasis upon this transformative, transitory and in-between sense: such as hybrid, liminal and interstitial. Thus, in this paper the novel Reluctant Fundamentalism would be critically explained via a historical moment of transition moving from Pre-9/11 to Post-9/11 in terms of chronological sequence, in order to explore the functions and dynamics of cultural hybridity in different scenes.

Situation of Changez’s Cultural Hybridity in the Pre-9/11 Era

At the onset of this novel, the main character Changez has virtually problematized the notion of essentialized cultural identity and subjectivity as a Pakistani national, “I am both a native of this city and a speaker of your language” (Hamid, 2007, p. 1).  As he tells this to an unnamed American interlocutor in the city of Lahore, Pakistan, thinking back to the past story of his upper mobility to a highly-paid position in Underwood Samson after his graduating from Princeton University in the United States of America, and to the incident of his love affairs with American girl Eric in the pre-9/11 era, when America is unforgettably memorized by him as a land of promise, hopes, progress, development, opportunities and even inclusive multicultural and multi-ethnic living spaces, where Changez peacefully reimagine and reinvent his cultural identity, though in the state of oscillating and ambivalent, mutable border-crossing space in between homeland and host land, often feeling alienated, displaced and dislocated culturally, socially and politically. For instance, when he paid a visit to Erica’s home in the centre of New York City, he did make a contrast between two locations where he was feeling at ‘home’, one in New York realistically at present vector and the other imaginary in Lahore in the past vector. He made an explanation of that feeling at Erica’s home: 

“I had a peculiar feeling; I felt at home. Perhaps it was because he had recently lived such a transitory existence---moving from one dorm to the next---and longed for the settled nature of my past; perhaps it was because I missed my family and the comfort of a family residence, where generations stayed together, instead of apart in an atomized state of age segregation.” (Hamid, 2007, p. 57-58).  

It indicates that Changez, demonstrating to us a kind of bicultural tendency, tends to acquire the liminal space to some extent predicted upon complex differences, heterogeneity, as well as ongoing negation, negotiation and integration between two cultures. Relocating and replacing Pakistani-American cultural identity, as suggested in the novel, as a dynamic and mutable process, can be critically evidenced by literary critics Stuart Hall (1999), as he considers identity politics to be framed by two vectors, operative simultaneously: one vector based on similarity and continuity; and another on difference and rupture. Thus, Pakistani-American identities could be traced on the basis of this dialogic relationship between two vectors. As Tang WeiMing (2010) adds, the vector of similarity and continuity stimulates the strategic, political, transitory and temporary reconfiguration and reconstruction of an ethnic cultural particularity that consists in some consistency with the past history; the vector of difference and rupture indicates a commonly shared experience in hostland, of a profound discontinuity and rupture with the past story through diaspora and immigration around the globe, which celebrates cultural difference, heterogeneity and hybridity between cultures, presenting an intercultural negation, negotiation, transformation and translation and permeations and hybridization. This points, Tang WeiMing (2010) further points out that the temporality of the past history concurrently consists of and goes through spatiotemporal transformation and hybridization, simultaneously accompanying the temporality of this present story. Therefore, it may be argued that in this liminal and interstitial space of negotiation and transformation, the mixture, intersection and hybridization of the past spatial temporality and present spatial temporality is reconstructed through imagination, remembrance, invention and agency, In representing the spatiotemporal reconstruction of cultural hybridity in the U.S. multicultural society in terms of Hall’s Points of view, cultural hybridity reshapes Pakistani-American ethnicity as the result of intersective description of two vectors.

Mohsin Hamid’s novel, as its title indicates, investigates the notion of what it does mean to be a reluctant fundamentalist. For Changez, Fundamentalism is a buzzword used for either a capital-oriented one or a religion-tradition-oriented one. Changez presents his ‘reluctance’ to abide by American cultural logic ‘fundamentalism’ of capitalist business while he is reminded of Pakistani origin where people survive within a communal and reciprocal space under Pakistani traditions and Islamic practices. As conversing with an unnamed American stranger in Lahore, the protagonist Changez tells of the remembrance and reimagination of his past story about pre-9/11’s historic living experience in New York, when he was physically in the city of Lahore. Such experience was intersected and mixed with Changez’s nostalgic complex for the city of Lahore when he was in America, remembering his family enjoying a communal and reciprocal existence space in Lahore. Just as depicted in the readings of this novel, 

"But the status, as in any traditional, class-conscious society, declines more slowly than wealth. So we retain our Punjab Club membership.” (Changez said) (Hamid, 2007, p.11)

“Focus on the principle. This is Underwood Samson’s guiding principle, drilled into us since our first day at work. It mandated single-minded attention to financial detail, teasing out the true nature of those drivers that determine an asset’s value. And that was precisely what I continued to do, more often than not with both skill and enthusiasm. (Changez said) (Hamid, 2007, p.112)

On the simplest level, it is telling a story of typically bicultural ‘dialogue’ between American cultural logic of economic fundamentalism as neo-colonialism, insisting on paramount values of individualism, consumerism, materialism and self-worth, and Pakistani ‘stereotyped’ cultural or religious origins, imagined as so-called ‘fundamentalism’ by America. On the other side, it may be assumed that Hamid radically explores the procedural nature of an itinerant sense of self-identity when one is confronted with the globalized circulation of American-dominated transnational capitals, transcultural population and the spreading of scientific technologies as well as being faced with Pakistani national modernity, tradition and culture.  Thus, Hamid has to objectively present the ambivalent and liminal spaces beyond geographical borders “Where there is an unprecedented circulation of people, goods, communication, ideas and cultures.” (Brubaker, 2005, p. 6), as far as transnational and migrant identities are concerned.  

Besides, Changez, confronted with American neo-colonialist hegemony, internalizes the cultural logic of American capitalist fundamentalism by mimicry and repetition, by which is supposed that Changez could subconsciously locate a crack and rupture in the certainty of American-styled fundamentalism as the ambivalent and liminal spaces of cultural difference where he is dislocated, displaced, hybridized and shifted culturally, politically and socially. According to Bhabha (1993), hybrid cultural identity is caused by this continuous negotiation and contestation in the blurred liminal and ambivalent space. Quratulain Shirazi (2017) points out, the Reluctant Fundamentalist is a reimagination and reshaping of liminal socio-political and cultural spaces that go beyond and disintegrate the national, and ethnic boundaries of cultural essence and exclusion predicted upon the differences of race, culture, tradition and religion. In sum, the cultural politics of Pakistani-American identity is a dynamic and fluid process of cultural hybridity that is ongoing and filled with hope, development, imagination, invention and remembrance of the Pre-9/11 attack to subvert the literary premise of binary oppositions in the postmodern and postcolonial scene. Just as Stuart Hall, David Held, et.al. (1996) point out, this type of hybridized cultural identity can be conceptualized as having no fixity, no essence for the post-modern subject predicted upon cultural, and racial differences and heterogeneity.

Radical Manifestation of Changez’s Cultural Hybridity in Post-9/11 Transition

In his Writing ‘Rights and Responsibilities’ Bhabha, H. K (2008), Bhabha interprets the 9/11 attack as a far-reaching moment of change and transition. On one hand, the radical transformation of individual cultural identity is in a sense largely influenced by the event of 9/11; on another hand, the event 9/11 attack has led to a stereotyped image of the Islamic community as terrorists against the American hegemonic role. According to Bhabha (1994), which “authorizes cultural hybridities that emerge in the moment of historical transformation" (p.2). The Muslim culture and community have been imaginarily projected as radical and aberrant fundamentalist one, resulting in what is today so-called the term ‘Islamophobia’. In The Reluctant Fundamentalism, the protagonist Changez's notion of cultural identity takes on an emergent transition after 9/11, when his alienated, fragmented and displaced identity is more related to radically transformative socio-political-cultural construction in America such as the radical emergence of American nationalism and resurgence of American neo-colonialism around the world. This radical transformation has generally led to radicalized self-consciousness of cultural identity among Muslim communities in the United States of America. It seems as if the call for the incompatibility between Pakistani culture and American culture objectively brings about the consequences of insurmountable permeation and intersection, just as Said in his Orientalism (1978) holds the belief in the absolute binary division between East and West or as Huntington claims the increased clash and confrontation between two cultures as static extremes, or some cultural theorists argue that more emphasis upon the working of cultural transformation accurately described in cultural hybridity might lead to neglecting the agency of the colonized, based on race, class and gender. To sum up, Reluctant Fundamentalism somehow complicated this perspective of cultural hybridity by exposing how Changez’s process of cultural hybridity is more radically stimulated in the Post-9/11 scene.

In post-9/11 America, as a Pakistani-American immigrant, Changez racially suffers this agony of alienation, exclusion, displacement and dislocation in America, and undergoes radical experiences in cultural difference and even rupture between Pakistani origin and original American identity, for example, passing through the American immigration desk, he was racially treated as someone totally ‘alien’ and ‘different’ from other colleagues with ‘pure’ American descent, because he is labelled and stereotyped as a potential terrorist threat to the American nation. The sufferings of isolation and dislocation Changez experienced are imaginarily symbolized in his breaking-up relationship with Erica. In the novel, as suggested Such a relationship built on love-hate and transitory relations to some extent symbolizes the existence of negotiable, ambivalent, liminal and interstitial space the migrant Changez occupies in-between Pakistani culture and American dominant culture, where Changez’s hybrid cultural identity is framed in the process, as Bbabha (2003) suggests that cultural identity of race and ethnicity is reconstructed and reshaped through contestation (negation), negotiation, translation, transformation and hybridity, which fundamentally acknowledges the cultural difference and heterogeneity and, meanwhile assumes that interconnectedness of cultural identities might be elucidated with the notion of hybrid global citizenship rather than one solid and essentialized national identity. Thus, the transnationality of cultural identities, integrated with radical cultural and political transformation at one historic turning point such as 9/11attack as an indicator in world history, would necessarily give rise to, to a larger degree, cultural difference and heterogeneity, where the exploration of cultural hybridity as the dynamic and mutable process of intersections and permeations could be traced in a larger liminal space of contestation, negotiation, integration, with a better prospect, in order to dissolve the literary horizon of dichotomy, clash and confrontation between two cultures. 

Conclusion

The Reluctant Fundamentalism is certainly a novel telling of a Pakistani immigrant and of his past experience of cultural acculturation to the United States of America, as well as of the story of fighting against the essentialized or fundamentalist cultural identities with the term ‘reluctant’, which indicates a type of resistance against all forms of fundamentalism predicted upon race, class, creed, religion, and culture and even gender. What this paper attempts to present through the reading of this novel is that Pakistani-American identity is not, as is often easily hypothesized in the context of multiculturalism, a melding of two monolithic cultures, nor is it an absolute subjection to one of the monolithically fixed cultures. Pakistani-American identity politics, as suggested in this novel, is a dynamic, fluctuating and mutable process of cultural hybridity, which is a critically politicized process of contestation, negotiation, interrogation, integration and hybridization between cultures, as well as is riddled with remembrance, fantasy and invention in the postmodern and postcolonial scene, though, in different period of spatial-temporal transition and transformation, in a common or radical sense.

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