Marketing secular anxieties: Mohsin Hamid’s planetary turn

ABSTRACT

This article unpacks Mohsin Hamid’s position as a global novelist invested in translating the world view of Muslim characters for a secular, western audience. Its approach to Hamid’s secularism combines materialist with textualist frames of reference, seeing the circulation and reception of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Exit West (2017) as entangled with the novelist’s aesthetic strategies. The materialist approach, based on Graham Huggan’s and Sarah Brouillette’s work, questions how western audiences’ anxieties about religiously driven “Others” are marketed by the publishing industry, thus reinforcing the figure of the postcolonial author as a problematic interpreter of marginalized communities. The textualist approach argues that Hamid’s writing participates in the diffusion of global literature, and close reading will question how authors like him propose ways of reconsidering and rewriting hegemony through positioning themselves as “embedded with the world”, and by forging geocentred fictions which, paradoxically, trace lines of flight from the global marketplace.

KEYWORDS:

• Mohsin Hamid
• marketplace
• secularism
• global literature
• planetary turn
• Islamophobia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Veyret

Paul Veyret is senior lecturer in contemporary British and postcolonial literature and cinema at Bordeaux Montaigne University. He is also a fellow of the Institut Convergences Migrations working on Sri Lankan diasporic cinema. His most recent publications include: “Beyond the Meridian Cage: Geocriticism, the Future of Postcolonial Literature, a study of Daniyal Mueenuddin’s Other Rooms, Other Wonders and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West” in Postcolonial Literature: A Study of Past, Present and Future Trends, edited by Sakshi Semwal (2022); and, with Anthony Goreau-Ponceaud, “Exorcising Traumas: Jude Ratnam’s Demons in Paradise (2017)”, in South Asian Diaspora 14 (2), 2022.