Risky business in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland

Bibliographic Data

ID9002801
AuthorsSimon Van Schalkwyk (0000-0003-4407-2922, University of the Witwatersrand, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume57
Issue3
Pages703-721
Publication date2020-04-28
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-9894 • E-ISSN: 1741-6442
PublisherSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/0021989420915946
OpenAlexW3020845115
LanguageEN
References cited24

This article reads Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland as novels similarly preoccupied with the surreptitious linkages between risk, financial speculation, and terror. In doing so, it argues that Hamid and O’Neill mark a shift away from the post-9/11 novel’s prevailing investment in traumatic domesticity in order to develop nuanced treatments of how, in the wake of 9/11, risk, speculation, and terror are intensified along racial lines, and unevenly distributed across geopolitical divides between the Global North and South. In this way, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Netherland reveal the superficial nature of risk society’s ideal subject. Beyond this, however, these novels also demonstrate risk society’s continued production of speculative or dissembling narratives designed to shield precarious subjects against future risks, while also projecting risky affective and political reinvestments in national contexts presumably consigned to vestigial status in an otherwise global imaginary

Art · Economics · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Speculation · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · History · Law · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

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