Protean Power Structures and the Problematic Standing of Post 9/11 Pakistani Fiction in English This thesis engages Critical Discourse Analysis as a tool to explore and analyse the problematic standing of post-9/11 Pakistani Fiction in English. Taking on board the Foucaultian notions of discourse, along with assumptions from the socio-political domains, this study is an attempt to understand the influence of the fluctuant post-9/11 episteme on the aims of this genre of fiction as it negotiates with its dispositive. This study investigates whether post-9/11 Pakistani Fiction in English can engender a new discourse and a new subject identity in relation to global power structures within the contemporary liminal temporal space and whether it is a part of the dominating discourse, reinforcing domination, or if it is resisting the hegemonic discourse. My thesis also investigates how individual subject identities are constructed in the fluctuating global dispositive created after 9/11. In doing so, it analyses the semantic macrostructures present in Kamila Shamsie's Burnt Shadows and H. M. Naqvi's Home Boy in relation to the socio-political discourses and the varying epistemic paradigms that are shaping Muslim identity in the post-9/11 scenario. It then proceeds to explore the alteration in the subject identities of the major characters of these novels and the choices that they make not only in relation to the global dispositive that is governed by American interests, but also in relation to Islam and Muslims. In doing so, these novels do not only take Muslim characters within their purview, they also bring into focus American characters and the patterns of their orientation towards Muslims. Through an analysis of these elements, this thesis argues that while this genre of fiction cannot radically alter the post 9/11 global episteme, however, since it is a discoursal subject of two opposite ideological outlooks, it functions from within the dominant power structure to raise vital questions that can bring about a rapprochement between the antipodal Muslims and the West. In using English as a medium of expression, this genre is not merely the point of rupture within the existing socio-political discourses, it also offers an ideological detente between the hegemonic order and it’s Other, i.e., the Muslim world.
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