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From the migrant perspective,
Burnt Shadows
represents in detail the
plight of people in diaspora regardless of their attachment to or
distance from their countries of origin. The novel directly addresses
the convergences and disjunctions among diaspora, the nation, and the
world, thereby making a critical intervention in diaspora, postcolonial,
and globalization studies. As Vinay Dharwadker points out, over the
last three decades or so, in postcolonial and globalization studies, the
association of diaspora and cosmopolitanism derives from “a series of
links between migration and hybridity and diaspora and creolization,”
as evidenced, for example, by Salman Rushdie’s
The Satanic Verses
and
Homi K. Bhabha’s theories (2011: 126). Shamsie’s novel does not
negate the possibility of achieving cosmopolitanism through diaspora,
as my later analysis will show; yet, it questions the general association
between the two without distinguishing “subaltern diasporas and elite
diasporas” and “what kinds of diaspora consciousness and double
consciousness they develop” (Dharwadker, 2011: 141). In the novel,
Shamsie depicts how, in the post-9/11 United States, an illegal Afghan
migrant worker is denied basic human rights, not to mention an
opportunity to intermingle in two cultures, because of his ethnicity and
socioeconomic class. Abdullah, Raza’s childhood friend, is an Afghan
working illegally as a taxi driver in New York. Because he is an
undocumented migrant worker, he “jumped out of the window” when
“some FBI guys came around to his apartment building” and “knocked
on the door” (Shamsie, 2009a: 304). Even though he runs away simply
out of fear, his act is taken as “evidence of terrorism” (305) in the wake
of 9/11. If Abdullah is arrested, he could be detained indefinitely as a
terror suspect in compliance with the Patriot Act. It would have been a
benign act of protecting human rights had Kim, at Raza’s request,
helped innocent Abdullah leave the United States. And yet, when Kim
drives Abdullah across the border and arrives in Canada, her patriotism
gives her the impulse to secretly report Abdullah to the police. At the
same time, Raza is at the border to return from Afghanistan to the
United States and finds the police arriving to arrest Abdullah. In order
to protect Abdullah, Raza comes out and is himself arrested by the