This dissertation argues that 9/11 Pakistani novels and films privilege cosmopolitan encounters by Muslim, and occasionally non-Muslim, characters that are in conflict with power and simultaneously reject those interactions that are complicit with it. I define cosmopolitan actions as those that do not merely celebrate but critically engage with foreign cultures and peoples at home and abroad. For the purpose of this project, I confine my analysis of power to the influence wielded by religious fundamentalists and political empires.
To make my argument, I examine six Pakistani texts in which 9/11 is not merely a temporal marker but central to their ideological contexts and narrative strategies. These include Nadeem Aslam' s novel The Wasted Vigil (2008), Shoaib Mansoor' s film Khuda Kay Liye (2007), Kamila Shamsie' s novel Burnt Shadows (2009), Mohsin Hamid' s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), H. M. Naqvi' s novel Home Boy (2009), and Joseph Castelo' s film (co-authored by Ayad Akhtar and Tom Glynn) The War Within (2005). Pakistani novelists and filmmakers have acquired global visibility in the last decade, but their contribution to our understanding of 9/11 has not been sufficiently acknowledged.
This project particularizes the recent turn in cosmopolitan theory to accord greater significance to religion in understanding global and local networks. I demonstrate how Pakistani writers and filmmakers represent a gamut of Muslim encounters with foreignness and thereby contest the dominant post-9/11 narrative that Muslims are inherently parochial. The turn towards religion in theories of cosmopolitanism is consistent with a new direction in which postcolonial studies is headed. In his 2012 article "Postcolonial Remains," published in New Literary History, Robert Young notes that postcolonial studies has not paid adequate attention to resistance couched in a religious idiom. In this project, I take Young' s suggestion forward by examining the multiple ways in which Muslim characters in 9/11 Pakistani literature and cinema forge ties with strangers at home and abroad despite antagonizing Islamic fundamentalists and custodians of the American Empire.
In chapter 1, I detail the antagonistic relationship between cosmopolitanism, Islamic fundamentalism, and the American Empire as a framework to analyze 9/11 Pakistani works. My study of 9/11 Pakistani fiction and film also contributes to other ongoing debates in cosmopolitan theory. In chapter 2, I argue that a cosmopolitan worldview is not restricted but enabled through a critical consciousness of home. In chapter 3, I suggest that cosmopolitan links between characters in the Global South can be a threat to the American Empire. In chapter 4, I examine the limits of empathy in instances where characters reject a cosmopolitan worldview after being dehumanized by acts of torture.