Performing Identities: A Study of H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy

Abstract

There’s an ugly phenomenon in this country. . . The last permissible racism here - and by permissible, I mean it’s okay publicly in the media and elsewhere - is to be racist against Arabs                                                                                                    Edward Said (2005)

This paper culls out how issues of ethnocentric dilemma, identity politics and cultural clashes that intensified after the September 11 attacks became a spectacle to mobilize nationalistic feelings of the US vs. the rest and generated a discourse of power which accelerated the xenophobia fashioned by the US hegemony. H.M.Naqvi’s Homeboy brings to the fore how the terrorist attacks ended up in the production of colonial discourse - an exclusive American nationalistic rhetoric, which consciously excluded the Pakistani Muslim migrants who willingly subscribed to the culturally homogenous cosmopolitan society.