KAMILA SHAMSIE’S HOME FIRE: NEO-RACISM AND THE ‘HOUSE MUSLIM
KAMILA SHAMSIE’S HOME FIRE: NEO-RACISM AND THE ‘HOUSE MUSLIM

Summary/Abstract: Home Fire (2017) by Kamila Shamsie fictionally reveals the security concerns and identity crises of British Muslims through the represented experiences of its minor and major characters from a Muslim background and literalises the process in which the ‘otherised’ struggle to be recognised, acknowledged and included through the reconstitution of the ‘self’ in relation to the discursively ‘legitimate’ narratives of the mainstream ‘white’ society. In the novel, the Muslim characters who perform the requirements of a ‘proper’ Muslim image are accepted into the neo-colonial centre, while those who do not fit into the ‘proper’ Muslim image are demonised and criminalised. Considering the conditional inclusion of the ‘otherised’, this article will, in this context, attempt to investigate the operation of neoracism in postmodern capitalism and focus on the construction of acceptable otherness within the context of the discursive hegemony of orientalist epistemological formations. The article will also attempt to contribute to and develop Hamid Dabashi’s concept of the ‘house Muslim’ in order to articulate the cultural and ideological interpellation of the Muslim colonial subject into the dominant logic of the metropolitan culture.

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