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perspectives, it is critical as well. In her most recent novel,
A God in
Every Ston
e, Shamsie takes a step further to develop a critical
cosmopolitanism that is not merely about plurality, but, as Delanty
suggests, it also “concerns the internal transformation of social and
cultural phenomena through self-problematization and pluralization”
(2006: 41). The reflexive process of self-understanding that critical
cosmopolitanism entails arises as a result of “the interplay of self, other
and world” (41).
A God in Every Stone
zeros in on self-transformation,
first and foremost, by reflecting on the question of divided loyalties.
The novel was published in 2014, the year Shamsie gained British
citizenship. It is also the first novel she claims to have written outside
of Karachi (Shamsie, 2015). With its theme of divided loyalties,
A God
in Every Stone
shifts the emphasis of cosmopolitanism from “seeing
globalization as the primary mechanism” to “internal developmental
processes within the social world” (Delanty, 2006: 27). It also
exemplifies how Shamsie transforms her crisis as a migrant who felt
“betrayed and betrayer both” upon receiving British citizenship
(Shamsie, 2014a) into an opportunity to find different ways of
engaging in the political activities and social reforms of Pakistan,
Britain, and the world.
Unlike
Burnt Shadows
, part of which is set in the post-9/11 world,
A God in Every Stone
is a historical fiction that reimagines the world in
the past. It also differs from
Burnt Shadows
and Shamsie’s earlier
Karachi novels in its focalization. The narrative is presented not only
through the subaltern perspective of the colonized and oppressed but
also through the colonial perspective of the English, as Shamsie
imagines, for the first time in her writing career, an Englishwoman as
her protagonist. Except for the brief opening (515 BC) and ending
(485 BC) about Scylax of the Persian Empire and his circlet, the novel
is divided into two parts and is set largely in London and Peshawar in
the years between the start of WWI and the escalation of the Indian
struggle for independence from the British Raj in 1930. Book I begins
in July 1914 with an Englishwoman, Vivian Rose Spencer, who joins
the Turkish archaeologist, Tahsin Bey, at a dig in Turkey. When WWI