Exclusion, empathy, and Islam: The Runaways in the literary marketplace

ABSTRACT

With the location of the global literary marketplace in western centres, post-9/11 interest in anglophone Pakistani literature comes with the fetishization of minoritized identities. Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways combats Islamophobic arguments about the Islamic origins of radicalization, showing that it emerges out of exclusion stemming from material facts of race, class, and gender. However, the novel's place in the literary marketplace complicates Bhutto's efforts to elicit empathy from readers. This article argues that although The Runaways is ideologically opposed to Eurocentric cosmopolitan liberalism, it occasionally falters in its representation of Pakistan and Islamic practices. The novel’s empathy is invested in universalism, suggesting a blind spot which is attributable to the global literary marketplace’s anticipation of a secular cosmopolitan “elite” readership. Through analysis of Bhutto’s novel, this article explores the possibility of productive empathy, and interrogates the ethics of reading and writing the other.

KEYWORDS:

• Empathy
• Islam
• Fatima Bhutto
• literary marketplace
• cosmopolitanism
• radicalization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Examples include Marin Amis (2006), John Updike (2006), Don DeLillo (2007), and Frank Miller (2011).

2. The word “pure” appears throughout the text in this context (Bhutto 2018c, 171, 252, 530, 641).

3. This genre spans everything from Azar Nafisi (2003) to Khalid Hosseini (2003) and Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb (2013). While these stories hold their own merits, they become bestsellers for reasons associated with an Orientalist imagining of Islamicate cultures (Kamal 2018, 1–19) and as modern iterations of Harem literatures (Whitlock 2007, 88).

4. Appiah borrows the term “otherness machines” from Pakistani writer and critic Sara Suleri (1989, 105).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of York (Overseas Research Scholarship).

Notes on contributors

Sauleha Kamal

Sauleha Kamal PhD investigates connections between the novel, empathy, and human rights, and problematizes them in terms of the economic aims of the literary marketplace. She has published articles in Postcolonial Text and The Routledge Companion to Humanism and Literature (2021), and essays in Desi Delicacies (2021), The Atlantic, and DAWN. She was a resident fellow in writing at Yaddo in New York (2019).