“We are the glue keeping civilization together”: Post-Orientalism and counter-Orientalism in H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy

Abstract

After the 9/11 attacks, Orientalist ideologies have dissolved into various public domains of knowledge, cutting their way from academia into popular imagination. In diagnosing these dangerous developments, critics such as Hamid Dabashi have identified the need to re(de)fine the Saidian framework in order to both locate and dislocate new sites of Orientalism. Through a close reading of H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy (2009), this essay explores how the novel is informed by a decisive counter-Orientalist politics that forges a narrative strategy to dissect the emergent post-Orientalist discourse(s). Such a reading is aimed at re-articulating the changing yet diffuse modes of (post-)Orientalism outside of its literary parameters. At the same time, the essay examines how the novel inflects both the solidarity and suspicion amongst minority communities in the post-9/11 context by means of shared victimhood.

Keywords:

• post-Orientalism
• counter-Orientalism
• post-9/11 fiction
• parallel/serial minoritization
• H.M. Naqvi

Notes

1. It is often the case that in the post-9/11 context, parallel/serial minoritization is reproduced through state-policies that privilege “model minorities”. See Arun Chaudhuri’s essay in this special issue.