277 / 138
Engaging Politically from the Margin 277
police, who believe they have arrested Abdullah. The novel’s ironic
and dramatic ending manifests how, in the post-9/11 United States,
Muslims simply look alike to paranoid Americans and are subject to
investigation or arrest no matter whether they are illegal immigrants or
green-card holders.
As subaltern as Abdullah, Hiroko is, however, a critical
cosmopolitan in the novel. She is neither one of the elite nor “the ‘new
diasporas’ under globalization, which mostly prove to be dispersions of
professionals and corporate personnel” (Dharwadker, 2011: 137).
Instead, Hiroko is displaced thrice in the novel, first from Japan to
British India after the atomic bombing on Nagasaki, then from British
India to Pakistan after Partition in 1947, and finally from Pakistan to
the United States in 1998 for fear of a nuclear war between India and
Pakistan. It is not the simple fact of living in several foreign countries
that makes Hiroko a cosmopolitan, as Abdullah’s case has clearly
challenged a direct and simple equation between diaspora and
cosmopolitanism. Rather, Hiroko can be argued to be a critical
cosmopolitan because of the kind of “border thinking” she shows in
her critique of aggressive nationalism and various forms of imperialism,
even before she leaves Japan. As Mignolo maintains, “[b]order thinkers
did not buy into” the idea of “a world without borders” (2011: 332);
instead, border thinking “confront[s], and delink[s], from the imperial
and colonial differences,” which, according to Mignolo, are “strategies
of classification . . . that the world is built on two poles, the negative
and the positive” (2011: 337, 330). Unlike Mignolo, whose “critical
cosmopolitanism” (2000: 723) or “decolonial cosmopolitanism” (2011:
329) simply questions Eurocentered cosmopolitanism or global
imperial designs of the West, Hiroko in Shamsie’s novel is critical of
both American ethnocentric patriotism and Japanese imperialism. The
beginning of the novel presents a sharp contrast between Hiroko’s and
Americans’ views of the atomic bombing on Nagasaki. For Hiroko, the
bombing is an “unspeakable” trauma (Shamsie, 2009a: 100), whereas,
for one of the Americans Hiroko has worked for in Tokyo, “the bomb
was a terrible thing, but it had to be done to save American lives” (63).