Abstract:
Pakistan and its vital role in the War on Terror continued to garner international attention in the aftermath of 9/11 such that its ‘imagery’ permeated various art forms such as movies, novels etc. These mediums act not only as knowledge producers but also as knowledge regulators. Amongst these, novels become conduits of ‘representational identities’, and if written from a local perspective aspire to communicate to the audience who we are, what we are and how we are. Keeping pace with their international peers, the Anglophone writing community based in Pakistan participated in this global frenzy by writing novels, with narratives based in Pakistan, labeled as Pakistani fiction genre, and through these stories communicated the lived experiences of the people in the country. These narratives created a cultural image of “Pakistani experience” for the readers, through the fictional realities, the writers thus became the “cultural brokers” of the “Pakistani experience” between Pakistan and the readers. For the purpose of research the research selects three most engaged with pieces of fiction from post 9/11 genre “The reluctant fundamentalist (2007), Exit West (2017) and Homefire (2017). This is an interdisciplinary inquiry that employs Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis as a methodological technique; this research explores the various kinds of ‘imagery’ constructed through Pakistani novels, and the degree to which the representation of the Pakistani people is commensurate with their reality. The research is further guided by two conceptual frameworks i.e. Edward Said’s Orientalism and Lau and Mendes’s re-orientalism and through them explores how representational identities, conveyed through fictional texts create different kind of conflicts.
