The Post-Post Colonial Condition: Globalization and Historical Allegory in Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke
2005; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1920-1222
Autores Tópico(s)South Asian Studies and Diaspora
ResumoI certainly think there is a generation. I'm sure a lot of voices you're seeing coming out now are who never had a colonial experience. We don't place a burden of guilt on someone who's no longer there. So it's like, what are we doing with where we come from, and how can we address issues here. It's our fault if things aren't going well. That's a very different stance than a lot of what's come before. Also, are writing about the subcontinent with eyes that are not meant to be seeing for someone who doesn't live there, who are not exoticizing where they come from. I try not to mention the minaret, because when I'm in Lahore, I don't notice it. The basic humanity is not different from place to place. Mohsin Hamid (The Chronicle Online np) I. Locked Out of the Kitchen With its sustained focus on the effects of economic globalization, Mohsin Hamid's Moth Smoke stands apart from many South Asian English-language novels popular with readers and academics in the West. While the fiction of Bharati Mukerjee, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Chandra, Ardashir Vakil, Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri and Manil Suri deals tangentially with economic change, these writers are primarily interested in the nature of cultural production and identity in an increasingly hybridized postcolonial world. Some of these texts are set in South Asia and deal explicitly with the postcolonial condition. In The God of Small Things, for example, Roy writes about the myriad cultural dislocations visited on her characters by British colonialism, and she develops a sustained examination of Anglophilia as a cultural phenomenon in India. (1) Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain offers an exhaustive analysis of the cultural effects on India of the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the rise of the British Raj. (2) Other writers of South Asian descent working in the West, like Mukherjee and Lahiri, have written principally about diasporic experience, about the cultural dislocations that accompany migration, immigration, or exile. (3) Many of their stories are either set in the United States or depict (as does Suri's The Death of Vishnu) an India profoundly disrupted at the cultural level by colonization. Economic change and material conditions connected to colonization and postcolonization play a role in each of these texts, but the emphasis in most of them is on the cultural effects of British colonialism as they continue to manifest themselves under postcolonialism. In Moth Smoke, however, Hamid sets out to analyze contemporary Lahore through a post-post-colonial framework, one less interested in foregrounding the persistent effects of British colonization than dramatizing how economic globalization has transformed Lahore and the characters populating his novel. (4) Unfolding during a few months in the spring of 1998, Moth Smoke focuses on a group of thoroughly Westernized young men and women from financially well-off families with American Master of Business Administration degrees (MBAs). The protagonist, Darushikoh Shezad, has clung to the fringes of this group. Too poor to study abroad, he earned his MBA in Lahore and, at the outset of the novel, is working as a mid-level functionary in a local bank. His best friend, Aurangzeb (Ozi), is the son of a well-off, corrupt, money-launderer (184) and has just returned with his new wife, Mumtaz, from studying in New York. While Daru works at his bank for modest pay, Ozi is following in his father's footsteps, creating little shell companies, and open dollar accounts on sunny islands, far, far away from Lahore (185). The main contrast at the outset of the novel is between Daru's struggle to work through the system and Ozi's belief that corruption is so widespread that prosperity can only come through corruption. (5) Ozi muses at one point that people are robbing the country blind, and if the choice is between being held up at gunpoint or holding the gun, only a madman would choose to hand over his wallet rather than fill it with someone else's cash (184). …
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