Possessed by whiteness: Interracial affiliations and racial melancholia in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Abstract

Drawing on whiteness studies and psychoanalytical theory, this article explores representations of interracial relationships as a means to claim and/or contest the ideal of whiteness in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In Hamid’s novel, the 9/11 attacks trigger a crisis in self-identification for model-minority Pakistani protagonist Changez, which proves illuminating in terms of the invisible racial subjugation exerted so far upon him by Jim, Changez’s passport into the corporate world, and by Erica, his (white) lifeline to exclusive Manhattan. The article focuses on the ways in which Hamid uses the post-9/11 context to reveal the racial melancholia surreptitiously informing today’s “new” versions of the American Dream, which is apparent in Changez’s and Erica’s relationship as well as in their parallel impossible mourning of the broken mirror of “white” Am/Erica. Emphasizing the extent to which whiteness and racial melancholia permeate the discourse of assimilation, Hamid’s book rewrites the “new” American Dream as what Anne Anlin Cheng has called a “fantasy built on absences”.

Keywords:

• America
• melancholia
• race
• whiteness
• Mohsin Hamid
• model minority

Notes

1. In view of the obvious symbolic nature of Erica’s and Chris’s names, the meaning behind Changez’s name has given rise to much speculation. Contradicting the suggestion that “Changez” is too close a homophone of “changes” not to evoke renewal and a future-oriented subjectivity – which is certainly what an English-speaking western readership would venture at first – Hamid specifies that “Changez” is the Urdu version of the name “Ghenghis” (“We are already afraid”), as in Ghenghis Khan, the warlord who conquered territories ranging from the edges of present-day Europe to China.

2. In her essay on the postcolonial novel after 9/11 Margaret Scanlan writes, for instance, that the silence of the American interlocutor is “much of the novel’s point” and she goes on to quote an interview with Hamid in which he states that, “in the world of [ … ] the American media, it’s almost always the other way around”; representatives of the Islamic world “mostly seem to be speaking in grainy videos from caves” (qtd in Scanlan, 274).

3. This phrase is borrowed from Homi K. Bhabha (Foreword).

4. Wendy Brown elaborates on the concept of “wounded attachment” in the third chapter of her States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Interestingly for my (melancholic) purposes, Brown argues that “in its attempts to displace its suffering, identity structured by ressentiment at the same time becomes invested in its own subjection. [ … ] Identity politics structured by ressentiment reverse without subverting [the] blaming structure [of the liberal discursive order]; they do not subject to critique the sovereign subject of accountability that liberal individualism presupposes, nor the economy of inclusion and exclusion that liberal universalism establishes” (qtd in Eng and Han 369).

5. This is a claim Hamid himself partially endorses in Yaqin, “Mohsin Hamid in Conversation”.