Mohammed Hanif’s Red Birds: “Anti-colonial textuality” and beyond

ABSTRACT

This article explores British Pakistani writer Mohammed Hanif’s novel Red Birds (2018) as a innovative, satiric account of US neo-imperialist war strategies (the so-called “Revolution in Military Affairs”), the duplicity involved in the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the pursuit of a capitalist economic order in an unnamed Muslim territory. In Hanif’s novel, US academic research initiatives aimed at understanding “the Muslim mind” and providing therapy for traumatized war victims tend to reinforce a cosmopolitan humanitarian world view that valorizes reason and experimentation while seeking to define the other. However, Red Birds also satirizes Third World Muslim societies trapped in dogmatism, lack of development, and forms of cultural deterioration. Hanif’s dark humour proves to be an appropriate means of exposing wrongdoing, as well as dramatizing cultural misconceptions on both sides of the novel’s apparent binary: that is, the advanced neo-imperial US and an economically precarious Third World Muslim country.

KEYWORDS:

• Mohammed Hanif
• Red Birds
• anti-colonialism
• war on terror
• humour
• Revolution in Military Affairs

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Asim Karim

Asim Karim is an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Central Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan. His research is focused on Pakistani writing in English, and he is the author of “Representation of Islam and Modern Enlightenment in Pakistani English Fiction” (Journal of Contemporary Poetics, 2018) and “Female Sexuality in Contemporary Pakistani Fiction” (Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2019). He also co-authored (with Zakia Nasir) “Multiculturalism and Feminist Concerns in South Asian Diaspora Novels” (Language, Linguistics, Literature, 2014). His current project is a monograph on Pakistani Anglophone Fiction: The Cultural and Transcultural Interface.