Keep the Home Fires Burning: Citizenship, Affect and Acting Muslim in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017)

Abstract

This study investigates the representation of the growth and influence of an affective notion of citizenship in Anglophone fiction, with a critical focus on Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire (2017). Informed by post 9/11 Orientalist and Islamophobic notions of Islam, citizenship is perceived as an affective practice which relies on the intersection of anti-Muslim cultural economies and forms of acting Islam. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the study relies primarily on Sara Ahmed’s affect theory (2004, 2014) and Khaled Beydoun’s notion of ‘Acting Muslim’ (2018, 2023). It seeks to provide an in-depth analysis of the relationship between anti-Muslim emotions and forms of acting Muslim in Shamsie’s novel and the influence of this affinity on the citizenship status of the Muslims living in post 9/11 British affective culture. Employing Ahmed’s concept of ‘affective economies’, it investigates how emotions of hate and suspicion get stuck to Muslim bodies in a way that vilifies their capacities of acting their Muslim identities, revoke their citizenship and push some of them to radicalization. The study ultimately concludes that in the post 9/11 world represented by Shamsie, emotions are crucial not only in understanding how Muslim citizens and immigrants are profiled as objects of hate and suspicion, but also in revealing the ways through which the cultural politics of citizenship, affect and acting Muslim intersect.