291 / 138
Engaging Politically from the Margin 291
III. Conclusion
From
Offenc
e and
Burnt Shadows
to
A God in Every Stone
,
Shamsie’s works show how a political event like 9/11 and its global
consequences, and a migrant writer’s geographical location and dual
citizenship, might have impacted her local and global political
engagement. In the moments when she is politically engaged, Shamsie
develops critical cosmopolitanism that arises as a result of the
interaction and tension between the local and the global. Such a
dynamic relation can be seen in
Offenc
e,
Burnt Shadows
, and
A God in
Every Stone
at three levels, all of which illuminate a universal
cosmopolitan project of diversality through border thinking and
self-transformation. First of all, in the post-9/11 era, the three books
can be read as Shamsie’s protest against the global violence of extreme
patriotism as well as the criminalization of Islam. This internationalist
message on global peace is combined on the one hand with the
domestic claims Shamsie lodges against the role that the government
plays in the rise of the hardliners in Pakistan, as discussed in
Offence
,
and, on the other hand, with the history of non-violent activism in
Peshawar that she traces in
A God in Every Stone
. The consequences of
the criminalization of Islam are most vividly depicted in
Burnt Shadows
,
as Pakistani or Muslim immigrants suffer from racial prejudice in the
United States after 9/11.
This demonstrates Shamsie’s critical cosmopolitanism at a second
level against the global design of imperialism, under the force of which
the sharp line between domestic and international politics can no
longer be drawn.
Burnt Shadows
illustrates how the domestic politics
of the United States, such as its Patriot Act, has affected immigrants
living within its national border. And, through Henry and Raza’s secret
connection with the CIA, the novel examines American interference in
Pakistan’s domestic politics since the Cold War, a problem that
Offence
deals with as well. In
A God in Every Stone
, which Shamsie claims to
have written totally outside of Pakistan, her attention is turned from
the transnational impact of American imperialism to the civilizing