Marketing secular anxieties: Mohsin Hamid’s planetary turn

Abstract

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.