From Cheap Labor to Overlooked Citizens: Looking for British Muslim Identities in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

Abstract

Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire is an adaptation of the Greek play Antigone contextualized in a post 9–11 Britain. Seen through the prism of a transnational framework, this novel is a narrative of British Muslims and their negotiations of their British Muslim identity. The intersecting trajectories of two families forms the narrative impetus and scaffolds the social, political and economic discourses within which the text is to be read. If Shamsie’s scene of race-religion interpellation is one way in which the narrative of Home Fire is framed, the cross cutting of British policies and legislation based on state anxieties is the other. In this paper, I offer parallel readings of the text and the discourses of the state that show radicalization’s emergence as a primary risk in the consciousness of the Global North; as a result, not only are the rights of citizenship curtailed, a certain cultural identity is produced that offers limited subject positions to the British Muslims. Intertextual readings of Home Fire and policy making in Britain reveals the limitations and sinister intentions of the state discourses around policing of communities and production of identities.

Keywords:

• British literature
• fiction
• multiculturalism
• radicalization and literature
• South Asian fiction
• women writers
• transnationalism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Here, I am using Hannah Arendt’s famous formulation to describe the basis of European political organization.

2 Shamsie’s personal story of citizenship also informs this narrative. She has spoken about it in several interviews including the one given to Vanessa Thorpe for The Observer (2017).

3 Don De Lilo, Updike and Amis struggle to represent cultural otherness; Mohsin Hamid and Leilani in their very different fictional explorations try to understand the ways in which the world has changed after 9/11 and look for “home” as a space to return.

4 For ways in which citizenship rights are regularly undermined in India and China see Dibyesh Anand, Hindu Nationalism in India and the Politics of Fear. 2011. India’s recent attempt at making some of its citizens stateless can be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/17/the-guardian-view-on-modis-citizenship-law-dangerous-for-all.

5 Mitchell D. Silber and Arvin Bhatt (2007) write about jihadist ideology as the key driver of terrorism. But Parvaiz does not quite transition through the four stages identified by them.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Debjani Banerjee

Debjani Banerjee teaches Humanities at New Jersey Institute of Technology and her research is focused on South Asian literature and nationalism. Her PhD is from Stony Brook University, New York and she has written on South Asian women writers and film makers including Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Divakaruni Banerjee and Mira Nair. She has translated several books including The Nectar of Life, Quotations from the Prose Writings of Rabindranath Tagore, The Penguin Guide to Ramayana and Mahabharata. Her most recent article, “And Kabir Stands in the Marketplace: Politics and Poetics in an Era of Global Strife” has been published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics in Autumn 2020.