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particular on her book-length non-fiction
Offence: The Muslim Case
(2009) and two recent novels,
Burnt Shadows
(2009) and
A God in
Every Stone
(2014). I am fully aware of the differences between fiction
and non-fiction in terms of formal elements, yet the three books are
read together in this essay because they mark two significant temporal
points in Shamsie’s life, 9/11 and her acquisition of British citizenship.
Unlike Rebecca L. Walkowitz, who, in
Cosmopolitan Style
, “treat[s]
literary style politically” (2006: 6), I focus attention on contextualizing
the aforementioned three books and reading them against Shamsie’s
earlier works in order to chart Shamsie’s progression from an activist
writer of domestic issues to her fusion of local and global politics in the
post-9/11 era. My approach to these works is therefore more holistic
and biographical than analytical or stylistic.
1Bringing to the fore the impact of international events,
immigration, and national allegiance on Shamsie’s political
engagement, I investigate in particular the ways that
Offence
,
Burnt
Shadows
, and
A God in Every Stone
deal with political issues of
terrorism, nationalism, imperialism, and gender politics, and the
impact of each on personal lives. Over the last two decades of the 20th
century, these issues have been under serious discussion in
globalization studies, transnationalism, diaspora, postcolonial and
feminist discourses. Critical cosmopolitanism, which I argue is present
in Shamsie’s works, is conceived in relation to concepts popular in
these scholarly discourses, yet it simultaneously complicates, challenges,
and at times even brings them into conflict. If a cosmopolitan is a
person who is, in a more or less utopian sense, a citizen of the world,
Shamsie is a critical cosmopolitan who, rather than celebrate the
borderless world and diversity under globalization, creatively
intervenes from the margin as a Pakistani, a Muslim, a woman, and a
1
An analytical approach is adopted, for example, in
Cosmopolitan Style
, in which
Walkowitz discusses modernist writers’ critical cosmopolitanism through
analyzing their literary styles and narrative strategies, including “wandering
consciousness, paratactic syntax, recursive plotting, collage, and portmanteau
language” (2006: 2).