279 / 138
Engaging Politically from the Margin 279
on Terror, respectively. The place and country names indicated in the
chapter titles suggest that these historical events are collective traumas
experienced by people in specific local contexts. Their traumatic
experiences, albeit of different scales, all attest to colonial and imperial
power that cuts across borders to dominate the world. There are
Hiroko as a “hibakusha,” namely “an explosion-affected person” in
Japan (Shamsie, 2009a: 50); Hiroko’s husband, Sajjad, as a subaltern in
British India and a “Muhajir,” “who had come to Pakistan from what
was now India at Partition” (152); their son, Raza, as a “a
bomb-marked mongrel” in Karachi (194); and Abdullah as a terror
suspect in the United States. These characters all represent subaltern
perspectives, from which Shamsie brings into question British,
American, as well as Japanese global imperial designs, in which “a set
of institutions or country determines the rules to be followed”
(Mignolo, 2011: 329). The links between the commonality of
Shamsie’s subaltern characters’ colonial experience with uncommon
local histories are shown subtly and metaphorically in the novel
through their interwoven relationship as either family members or
friends. Such links create a possibility to envision a universal project
similar to Mignolo’s “pluriversality” (343) or “diversality” (2000: 743).
Pluriversality or diversality as a universal project should not be
confused with diversity without borders. Rather, in Shamsie’s works,
pluriversality underscores connectivity to the world from a wide range
of borders, as represented in
Offence
by the pursuit of civil liberties of
all people and religions through attachment to different dimensions of
the local, and in
Burnt Shadows
by the subaltern’s common yet
different trauma experience of colonial and imperial differences.
II.
A God in Every Stone
: Pacifist Nationalism
and Women’s Rights
As discussed previously, paying attention to human particularity
and diversity, Shamsie’s cosmopolitanism is as rooted as Appiah’s
cosmopolitan patriotism, and, issuing forth from the subaltern