Post 9/11 Pakistan’s Diasporic Fiction

Redefining Boundaries of South Asian Literature

Abstract

Emerging South Asian diasporic writers writing in English from Pakistan of the last half of the twentieth century are now regarded as pioneers of Pakistani Diaspora of English fiction. This Diaspora can be roughly divided into the pre and post 9/11 writers. English fiction by the writers prior to the beginning of this century had a dominant post-colonial perspective; an example of which can be seen in the writings of Bapsi Sidhwa, Hanif Kureishi, Sara Suleri and Nadeem Aslam’s earlier works, to name a few. The second generation of Post 9/11 writings comprises works of those writers who have written their works mostly in the new century. Their writings reflect a poignant bend in the post-colonial perspective. Homi K. Bhabha terms this appropriation of post-colonial view as “hybridity [which he defines] as new, neither the one nor the other [, something which is] struggling to free itself from a past ancestry, and which values the ‘pure’ over its threatening opposite, the ‘composite’. It replaces a temporal linearity with a spacial plurality” (Ashcroft, 1989). It is this standpoint of post-colonial theory, the “spacial plurality” (Ashcroft, 1989) that this paper explores, with regards to post 9/11 Pakistani diasporic novel; delimiting it to the first decade of this present millennium. Linking the concept of spacial plurality with the informed discursivity regarding the power structures of Foucaultean new historicism, this paper explores diasporic voices of Pakistani fiction written in English in the ever increasing milieu of post 9/11 novel. It inquires into the ways in which the effects of 9/11 have penetrated the writings of Pakistani writers of English fiction. This exploratory paper studies the significance of such works of post 9/11 Pakistani fictional writers as Mohsin Hamid, H. M. Naqvi, Kamila Shamsie and Ali Sethi and premises that these writers, in a very subtle way, are redefining South Asian Literature.