Language, Genre, and the Politics of Literary Form in Pakistani Fiction in English

Abstract

This article argues that the political orientation of Pakistani fiction in English whether resistant or assimilative in its relationship to the metropolitan literary apparatus is inscribed in literary form, and that formal analysis is therefore both possible and necessary as a mode of political evaluation. Drawing on Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s distinction between abrogation and appropriation, Fanon’s analysis of the politics of colonial language acquisition, and Bhabha’s concept of colonial mimicry, the article demonstrates through comparative formal analysis of Muhammad Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti (2011) and Mohsin Hamid’s The Last White Man (2022) that the two novels embody radically opposed formal politics. Hanif’s formal strategies — genre subversion, vernacular code-switching, ironic satirical excess, and the refusal of consolatory narrative closure constitute formal resistant appropriation: the deployment of metropolitan literary conventions in the service of postcolonial resistant ends. Hamid’s formal strategies — Kafkaesque allegorical abstraction, cosmopolitan standard English, psychological interiority without cultural situatedness, and universalising narrative resolution constitute formal assimilative appropriation: the adoption of metropolitan literary forms with minimal transformation toward postcolonial purposes. Drawing on postcolonial theory from Fanon, Ashcroft et al., and Bhabha, the article demonstrates that formal distinction between the two novels is not merely aesthetic but political — a distinction between different intellectual commitments to the primary culture, different understandings of the writer’s social role and different answers to the question of what postcolonial literature in English is for.