Verge: Studies in Global Asias

Abstract:

This essay identifies ruins as the arch-geography of terror in Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The aesthetics of the literary trope of ruins locates the middle-class protagonist Changez’s terror not in destruction but in his recognition of the subcutaneous violence of liberal meritocracy and decaying grandeur. At a time when conventional ways of knowing colonial violence have settled into stagnant critiques, ruins highlight the need to indict the violence manifest in individualism and intimacy, affirmative forces that usually appear beyond reproach. The interweaving of terror with intimacy—itself a sign of how ruins’ aesthetics redistributes affect in the allegorical economy of the Erica–Changez romance—evokes both America’s sublime promise and its grotesque violence and recognizes histories of permeable boundaries and exchange.