Introduction: Frameworks

History & Memory

The Collective memory is not the same as formal history [….] General history starts only when
tradition ends and the social memory is fading or breaking up. So long as remembrance continues
to exist, it is useless to set it down in writing or otherwise fix it in memory. Likewise the need to
write history of a period, a society, or even a person is only aroused when the subject is already too
distant in the past to allow for the testimony of those who preserve some remembrance of it [….]
When this occurs, the only means of preserving such remembrances is to write them down in a
coherent narrative, for the writings remain even though the thought and the spoken words die. If
memory exists only when the remembering subject, individual or group, feels that it goes back to
its remembrances in continuous movement, how could history ever be a memory, since there is a
break in continuity between society reading this history and the past who acted in or witnessed the
events? [….] History divides the sequence of centuries into periods, just as the content of a tragedy
is divided into several acts. But in a play the same plot is carried from one act to another and the
same characters remain true to form to the end, their feelings and emotions developing in an
unbroken movement. History, however, gives the impression that everything […] is transformed
from one period to another. (Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory)

Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition.
Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution,
open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting [….] History, on the other hand, is the
reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer [….] At the heart of
history is a critical discourse that is antithetical to spontaneous memory. History is perpetually
suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it [….] these lieux de
memoire are fundamentally remains, the ultimate embodiments of a memorial consciousness that
has barely survived in a historical age that calls out for memory because it has abandoned it [….]
Museums, archives, cemeteries, festivals, anniversaries, treaties, depositions, monuments
sanctuaries, fraternal orders – these are the boundary stones of another age, illusions of eternity.
(Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’)

The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or they become
themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess.

Yet what can it mean that history occurs as a symptom? [….] The problem arises not only in regard
to those listen to the traumatized, not knowing how to establish the reality of their hallucinations
and dreams; it occurs rather and most disturbingly often within the very knowledge and
experience of the traumatized themselves. For on the one hand, the dreams, hallucinations and
thoughts are absolutely literal, unassimilable to associative chains of meaning [….] Yet the fact that
this scene or thought is not a possessed knowledge, but itself possesses, at will, the one it inhabits,
often produce a deep uncertainty as to its very truth. (Cathy Caruth, ‘Trauma and Experience’)

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move
away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his
wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past.
Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage
and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole
what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings
with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into
the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This
storm is what we call progress. (Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History)

Representing the ‘West’

Thus, although the ‘Orient’ may have appeared in Oriental Studies to be a term with a concrete
referent, a real region of the world with real attributes, in practice it took on meaning only in the
context of another term, ‘the west’. And in this process is the tendency to essentialize, to reduce the
complex entities that are being compared to a set of core features that express the essence of each
entity, but only as it stands in contrast to the other. In conventional anthropology, the orientalisms
that have attracted critical attention, thus, do not exist on their own. They are matched by
anthropologists’ occidentalisms, essentializing simplifications of the West. (James G. Carrier,
‘Introduction’, in James G. Carrier ed., Occidentalism: Images of the West)

The phenomenon of “political modernity” – namely, the rule by modern institutions of the state,
bureaucracy, and capitalist enterprise – is impossible to think of anywhere in the world without
invoking certain categories and concepts, the genealogies of which go deep into the intellectual
and even theological traditions of Europe. Concepts such as citizenship, the state, civil society,
public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual, distinctions between public
and private, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality, and so on all bear
the burden of European thought and history. One simply cannot think of political modernity
without these and other related concepts that found a climactic form in the course of European
Enlightenment and the nineteenth century [….] The European colonizer of the nineteenth century
both preached this Enlightenment humanism at the colonized and at the same time denied it in
practice. But the vision has been powerful in its effects. (Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing
Europe)

Postcolonial States

The colonial state was in every instance a historical formation. Yet its structure everywhere came
to share certain fundamental features. I will argue that this was so because everywhere the
organization and reorganization of the colonial state was a response to a central and overriding
dilemma: the native question. Briefly put, how can a tiny and foreign minority rule over an
indigenous majority? To this question, there were two broad answers: direct and indirect rule.
Direct rule was Europe’s initial response to the problem of administering colonies. There
would be a single legal order, defined by the “civilized” laws of Europe. No “native” institutions
would be recognized. Although “natives” would have access to European laws, only those
“civlized” would have access to European rights [….] In contrast, indirect rule came to be a mode
of domination over a “free” peasantry. Here, land remained a communal – “customary” –
possession […] The tribal leadership was either selectively reconstituted as the hierarchy of the
local state or freshly imposed where none existed, as in “stateless societies” [….]
Clearly, the form of the state that emerged through post independence reform was not the
same in every instance. There was a variation […] we can identify two distinct constellations: the
conservative and the radical. In the case of the conservative African states, the hierarchy of the
local state apparatus, from chiefs to headmen, continued after independence. In the radical African
states, though, there seemed to be a marked change […] The result, however, was to develop a
uniform, countrywide customary law, applicable to all peasants regardless of ethnic affiliation,
functioning alongside a modern law for urban dwellers. (Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject)

The entire story of the state for the half-century after independence can be seen in terms of two
apparently contradictory trends. In an apparent paradox, the history of Indian politics saw the
simultaneous strengthening of two tendencies that can be schematically regarded as the logic of
bureaucracy and the logic of democracy. The antecedents of both these trends could be found in
the history of colonial rule: the gradual domination of the society by modern state institutions
which brought significant social practices under its surveillance, supervision and control, and the
equally slow and cautious introduction of practices of representation – so that this increasing
control could be seen not as imposition of external rules of discipline, but impositions of rules and
demands generated by the society itself. Both trends became more extensive and powerful after
independence. (Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The Postcolonial State’)
Postcolonial Environment

Postcolonial studies has come to understand environmental issues not only as central to the
projects of European conquest and global domination, but also as inherent in the ideologies of
imperialism and racism on which those projects historically – and persistently – depend. Not only
were the other people often regarded as part of nature – and thus treated instrumentally as
animals – but they were also forced or co-opted over time into western views of the environment,
thus rendering cultural and environmental restitution difficult if not impossible to achieve.
(Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism)

They dazzle me with the tonnage of cotton or coca that has been exported, the acreage that has
been planted with olive trees or grapevines.
I am talking about natural economies that have been disrupted – harmonious and viable economies –
adapted to the indigenous population – about food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently
introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of metropolitan countries,
about the looting of products, the looting of raw materials. (Aime Cesaire, ‘Discourse on
Colonialism’)

The complex (and often conflicting-ridden) web, field, or system – whatever we choose to call it –
composed of the relationships between human and non-human agents or actors that define the
history of the Indian subcontinent is what I understand as ‘environment’ [….] urban spaces and
their various relationships with the rural, or even ‘waste’ lands and areas not inhabited by
humans, are also major environmental components [….] One of my basic assumptions here has
been that despite their obvious commodification as cultural objects in the contemporary global
market, the ‘literariness’ of Indian literature in English ought to interest us because of the way in
which its inventiveness, alterity and singularity offer a critique of its own status as desirable
commodity. And it does so by registering environment simultaneously at the levels of theme and
form. (Pablo Mukherjee, Postcolonial Environments)

Selected Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations (New York, 1968)

Carrier, James G. ed., Occidentalism: Images of the West (Oxford, 1995)
Caruth, Cathy, ‘Trauma and Experience: Introduction’ in Cathy Caruth (ed.), Trauma:
Explorations in Memory (Baltimore and London, 1995)
Cesaire, Aime, ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds.,
Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory (Hemel Hampstead, 1993)
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
(Princeton and Oxford, 2000)
Halbawchs, Maurice, The Collective Memory (1950: New York, 1980)
Huggan, Graham & Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment
(London and New York, 2010)
Kaviraj. Sudipta, ‘The Postcolonial State: The Special Case of India’,
http://criticalencounters.net/2009/01/19/the-post-colonial-state-sudipta-kaviraj/
Mamdani, Mahmood, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late
Colonialism (Princeton, 1996)
Mukherjee, Upamanyu Pablo, Postcolonial Environments: Nature, Culture and the Contemporary
Indian Novel in English (Basingstoke, 2010)
Nora, Pierre, ‘Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Memoire’, Representations 26
(1989)
District 9 (2009)

Apartheid Allegory?

Instantly identified upon its release in 2009 as an ‘apartheid allegory (with aliens)’, District 9, the
first feature by South African filmmaker Neill Blomkamp, has achieved phenomenal critical and
popular success as a fable rehearsing the conventional reverences of ethnic toleration and
multicultural plurality… this rhetoric of multicultural tolerance ultimately collapses in on itself to
reveal its fundamental opposite: that is, the compulsory ‘respect’ paid the other becomes simply
the positive articulation of (and implicit justification for) ‘his intolerance of my overproximity’
and, therefore, finally of the assertion of one’s own ‘right not to be harassed, which is a right to r

remain at a safe distance from others. (Eric D. Smith, Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science
Fiction New Maps of Hope)

District 9 is by and large a very good film and a very hard film to dislike, but here I have managed
it. If only because District 9 and James Cameron’s Avatar are two versions of the same film. At the
heart of both films is the phenomenon of interspecies transformation, which can easily be
understood through the base ideology of racial/cultural transformation. In Avatar the
transformation is from white man to noble savage. In District 9 the transformation is from white
man to poor black man. What is so startling about both films is that, in taking Kevin Costner’s
Dances with Wolves to its logical conclusion, the main character does not only assimilate the “alien”
culture but rather transforms bodily into the alien itself. (David Korotky, ‘Neill Blomkamp’s
District 9, Young Daguerrotypes, 30 June, 2010)

The ANC and its constituency did not seem well placed to manage South Africa’s transition into
globalization, so South Africa’s corporate sector, the IMF, World Bank, and diplomats launched a
concerted exercise … to “adjust” the ANC to the “realities” of globalized capitalism and shift their
economic policies. The benefits of market economics, export-led growth, and trickle-down
economics were promoted. The proselytizing exercise worked – the ANC was converted to the

“Washington consensus” and abandoned the development state and socialism. (P. Eric Louw, The
Rise, Fall and Legacy of Apartheid, 2004)

While the legal exceptionality of the film’s alien internment might at first seem an allegory for the
suspension of constitutional law during the officially declared South African State of Emergency in
the latter days of apartheid policy (1985–1990), and the aliens’ forced eviction the slum clearances
that played such a prominent role in the National Party’s political strategy (a way of both
suppressing communist mobilization and inflating urban employment statistics), we should also
recall that these actions were directly predicated on the state’s centralized authority to designate
discrete “population groups” in order to create a legal framework for cultural separation and
territorial partition”. Despite the fact that first contact with the aliens occurs in 1982, squarely in
the midst of the National Party’s reign, however, neither the party nor the state plays a significant
role in the film, the eponymous slum of which is not cleared until 28 years later, more than 15
years after the election of the African National Congress and the official end of the apartheid
order; in fact, the absent South African state is significant only in the conspicuous ceding of its
authority to MNU, and no representative of state power (neither human nor architectural nor
symbolic) appears in the film. Explicitly directing our attention to this transference of sovereignty,
Wickus observes during the preliminary briefing of his crew, “I think it’s a great thing that it’s not
the military guys in charge this time”, a point underscored in subsequent scenes depicting the

sociopathic military officer Kobus happily taking orders from the MNU director. (Eric D. Smith,
Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction New Maps of Hope)
In dealing with post-apartheid South Africa, District 9 makes visible new conditions for the
experience of a neoliberal landscape. In effect, the visual seductiveness of the mise-en-scène says
something about the actually-existing socio-economic and racial conditions in Johannesburg. One
could argue that Blomkamp is not interested in valorizing the status of black South Africans who
live with constant economic and social dissolution, but rather focuses his attention on the
contagious nature of neoliberalism in the post-apartheid now. These sentiments fall in line with
Patrick Bond’s account that since the 1990s there has been a gradual shift toward serving the elite
in South Africa over those from the disadvantaged classes. A telling sign to how the African
National Congress (ANC) went back on their prior socialist policies for every class is found in the
“emotional attachment to the principles of the 1955 Freedom Charter with its vague but prominent
redistribution slogans: The People shall share in the county’s wealth! The national wealth of our
country, the heritage of all South Africans, shall be restored to the people.” There is thus a
resonance to how these slogans have failed in Blomkamp’s narrative topoi – whereby racism, class
inequality and unemployment do not linger at the edges of the film but instead transmit a
competitive and volatile environment that the extraterrestrials and humans alike must try to
overcome: South Africa’s adoption of neoliberalism. The conflict between survivalist strategies by
the extraterrestrials and the cynicism over urban destitution and “race trouble” enacted by

executive power in the film offers a formula for reading the overtones of neoliberalism in South
Africa. (Wagner, ‘Zones of Regulation’)

Resident Aliens

Of especial prominence has been the return of the zombie and its phantasmagoric next-of-kin, the
werewolf, the alien, and the vampire, all of which have increasingly assumed the key features of
the former. In fact, the twenty-first-century zombie is easily distinguished from ist Cold War, pop-
culture predecessor by two fundamental characteristics: its proclivity for mass social organization
and its disarming speed and power… Latter-day zombies eschew the standard (and perfectly
logical) encumbrances of rigor mortis and in fact do not appear dead at all. On the contrary, they
are possessed of an intolerable surfeit of life, an irrepressible surplus evident not only in their
agility and strength but also in their unprecedented cunning and collective coordination. (Eric D.
Smith, Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction New Maps of Hope)

[z]ombies, the ultimate nonstandard workers, take shape in the collective imaginary as figurations
of these conditions. In their silence they give voice to a sense of dread about the human costs of
intensified capitalist production;
about the loss of control over the
terms in which people alienate
their labor power; about the
demise of a moral economy in
which wage employment,
however distant and exploitative,
had “always” been there to
support both the founding of
families and the well-being of
communities. (Jean Comaroff and
John Comaroff, ‘Alien-Nation:
Zombies, Immigrants and
Millenial Capitalism’, South Atlantic Quarterly 2002)779-805

They become a wageless class. Here the extraterrestrials exist largely as scabrous bottom-
feeders, given limited state subsidy to live on. They drudge out a living as stateless and worldless
immigrants, a problem which is amplified in host countries where real world immigrants face
constant deportation.

Moreover, District 9’s extraterrestrial proletarian can also be tied to a displaced class, signaling the
dirempt nature of the term. Their subsistence relies upon scavenging and individual pursuits (some
fetishize discarded objects like women’s clothes or cat food) – a situation that allows one to think
of these creatures as a helpless class. They are what Makhulu calls new subjects – individuals
“shaped not so much by practices of consumption as by self-abnegation (or negative consumption)
– they are not only moral or rational but have a highly pragmatic orientation to the lived world.”
In the first half of the film, extraterrestrial Christopher Johnson and his son search to find the
missing fuel element to power their command ship. They forage through heaps of discarded
rubbish to eventually recover the elusive material – which exemplifies, in this regard, an example
of self-abnegation, using second hand objects rather than consuming new ones. Such hard work to
improve their socio-economic condition and return to the mothership occurs not through material
consumption but through
intelligent gathering.
(Wagner, ‘Zones of
Regulation’)
Zoned Cities

The new urbanism’s simultaneous production of both enclave communities and the slums that
Robert Neuwirth calls “shadow cities” signals at once an ongoing crisis in the global
(re)conceptualization of democracy and a final renunciation of the political/cultural/spatial
architectonics familiar to us as the constellation of modernism…. This “utopian” virtualization of
the bourgeois state into discontinuous clusters of nomadic, semi-autonomous nuclei is perennially
haunted, however, by its material/spectral complement in the sprawling, makeshift cities of the
global poor. More than a million people, for instance, illegally inhabit the vast warren of tombs
and mausoleums in Cairo’s infamous Qarafa, or “City of the Dead,” where they have ingeniously
adapted the ancient structures as functional housing, constructing shelving and bedding from
sepulchers of Egyptian nobility and pirating electricity from nearby lines to power lights,
appliances, and television sets. Similarly, the Congo Republic’s own “city of the dead,” Kinshasa,
is popularly known by its increasingly desperate inhabitants as cadavre, epavre, or Kin-la-poubelle:
“cadaver,” “wreck,” or “Kinshasa, the rubbish heap.” On the outskirts of Cairo one can also find

Manshiyat Naser, better known as Garbage City, where inhabitants, the Zabbaleen, literally live on
trash: collecting, sorting, recycling, or simply reselling about a third of the city’s refuse. (Eric D.
Smith, Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction New Maps of Hope)
Beyond the expression of subjective edginess, the term “edgy city” describes the objective layout of
oddly shaped and unevenly developed districts, an urban form that has defined the city from the
start. Johannesburg’s growth and slump through cycles of speculation and retreat over unevenly
joined parcels of real estate has always eluded the order of a rational street grid. This irrational
order has in turn provoked calls for reform, argued eloquently in the fortieth anniversary year by
British-born, Johannesburg-based architect and planner Stanley Furner in the South African
Architectural Record. Even earlier, after victory in the Anglo-Boer War in 1902 secured British
colonial control of Johannesburg until the Union of South Africa was established in 1910, the
outlines of suburbs carved out of the veld but as yet unconnected to established districts or visible
infrastructure demonstrate that speculation rather than orderly planning ruled the day
(Beavon). By 1939, undeveloped space in staked-out districts had been largely filled in, but the
districts retained their uneven sizes and edges into the twenty-first century, and continue to retard
the rational planning advocated by Furner and his colleagues nearly a century ago. Union (1910–
60) and Republican (1960–90) governments implemented residential segregation and economic
discrimination at the national and local levels, and thus sharpened the discontinuity of
Johannesburg’s urban form, but economic factors, over and above apartheid, shaped the city. Real
estate speculation in boom periods such as the 1930s and the 1960s, and the exploitation of cheap
labor, were the primary engines of capital flow and of suburban sprawl (Goga; Beavon). Well
before the end of the twentieth century, capital migration had hollowed out the historic central
business district (CBD) in the inner city and created a de facto CBD in the office parks and
simulated city squares of Sandton.
“Edgy city” also highlights the links between two apparently contrary tendencies in more recent
times. On the one hand, there is the globalised phenomenon of the edge city, ex-urban
developments of office parks and gated residential clusters whose sprawl even beyond established
suburbs or exurbs like Schaumburg beyond Chicago (Garreau), or Sandton beyond Johannesburg,
enabled by car ownership, has accelerated the hollowing out of city centers from Los Angeles
(Soja) to São Paolo (Caldeira) in addition to Johannesburg (Czeglédy; Goga; Beavon; Bremner). On
the other, an informal but complex streetwise order has emerged in Johannesburg as in other cities
with similarly sharp income disparities, within which internal as well as external migrants to the
city create their own infrastructure (Simone), developing pedestrian matrices of “belonging and
becoming” (Götz and Simone) that push beyond the boundaries defined by residential gates and
limited motorized access to (not so) freeways. Concerns about safety and security of property have
shaped not only the fortress architecture in the historically wealthy northern suburbs (Czeglédy),

but also the development of shopping malls and gated residential clusters in the former state-
administered black townships, from Soweto to other black districts between Johannesburg and
contiguous municipalities, such as expanding Ekurhuleni on the East Rand (Boraine et al.;
Alexander). (Loren Kruger, Imagining the Edgy City, 2012)

District Six was named the Sixth Municipal District of Cape Town in 1867. Originally established
as a mixed community of freed slaves, merchants, artisans, laborers and immigrants, District Six
was a vibrant center with close links to the city and the port. By the beginning of the twentieth
century, however, the process of removals and marginalization had begun. The first to be
'resettled' were black South Africans, forcibly displaced from the District in 1901. As the more
prosperous moved away to the suburbs, the area became a neglected ward of Cape Town. In 1966
it was declared a white area under the Group Areas Act of 1950.

By 1982, the most aggressive removal stage began, as black residents were forcibly removed from
their homes which triggered much violence. The registers of social strife in images of squatters
clinging to scraps of debris and garbage, resonates allegorically in District 9’s mise-en-scène.
Blomkamp’s film articulates the nuances of class and economic stasis for its black (and alien)
characters. At the same time, the film is explicitly and implicitly concerned with social and cultural
volatility post-1994 in the Mandela and Mbeki years: prejudice (to varying degrees),
multiculturalism, urban degradation, and, most judiciously mined, echoes of the District 6 riots,
particularly in District 9’s scenes of eviction and urban combat. (Wagner, ‘Zones of Regulation’)

Organ (ic) Farming

For Trevor Harrison, the explosive growth in illegal organ trafficking since the 1980s “must be
understood in the broader context of globalization, specifically the extension and intensification of
a capitalist mode of exchange.” Under the reifying logic of capital, “all objects lose distinction” and
are evaluated simply on the “basis of their relative equivalence;” therefore, “wombs are rented;
sperm is sold; and, finally, human organs ‘harvested’ [….] Unable otherwise to explain such
unimaginable horrors and paradoxes of postmodern reality, inhabitants of these slum cities – like
their first world intellectual counterparts – resort increasingly to the explanatory powers of the
fantastic. (Eric D. Smith, Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction New Maps of Hope)

An extreme case is found in one of the scenes of eviction, where Wikus displays complete
disregard for the new species and their incubating (and un-hatched) alien foetuses. He
demonstrates for the camera how to abort one of the 40 eggs found in a JV-766 shanty shack by
pulling out its incubation feeder, cutting off the alien from its food supply. He then radios for
ground support, whereupon a soldier arrives and torches the shanty hut with a flame-thrower.
(Wagner, ‘Zones of Exclusion)

The foulest deed is forcibly carried out by the human hand, which is simply revealed to be (as it
has always been) an instrument of MNU, the bare life whose production is also the foundation for
the latter’s post-national sovereignty. (Eric D. Smith, Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science
Fiction New Maps of Hope)

I would certainly be keen to make the point, with Azikiwe, that the Nigerian gangsters’ behaviour
and attributes are compositionally motivated, their brand of “muti,” for example, providing a
parallel with the laboratory experiments of MNU, both being attempts to acquire the powers of
another species. (James Zborowski, ‘District 9 and Its World’)
Selected Reading

Brown, Kimberly, ‘Every Brother Ain’t a Brother’, Cultural Dissonance and Nigerian Malaise in
District 9’s New South Africa’, Hollywood’s Africa After 1994 (2012)

Comaroff Jean and Comaroff John, ‘Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants and Millenial Capitalism’,
South Atlantic Quarterly 2002)779-805

Frassinelli, Pier Paolo. ‘Heading South: Theory, Viva Riva! And District 9’. Critical Arts 29.3 (2015):
293-309.

Gray, B. ‘A Hole in My Spine: The White Body, the Foreigner and Wounding in Avatar and District
9’.Home in Motion: The Shifting Grammar of Self and Stranger. Ed. P.F. Marcelino (Oxford: Inter-
Disciplinary Press, 2011): 133-42.

Hairstone, Andrea, ‘Different and Equal Together: SF Satire in District 9’, Journal of the Fantastic
in the Arts’, 22.3, 82 (2011), 322-346

Helgesson, Stefan. ‘District 9: The Global South as Science Fiction’. Safundi 11.1-2 (2010): 2010: 72-
5.

Kruger, Loren, Imagining the Edgy City: Writing, Performing and Building Johannesburg (2013)

Korotky, David, ‘Neil Blomkamp’s District 9, Young Daguerrotypes, 30 June, 2010)

Louw, Eric P., The Rise, Fall and Legacy of Apartheid (2004)

Marx, John. ‘Alien Rule’. Safundi 11.1-2 (2010): 164-7.

Moses, Michael Valdez. ‘The Strange Ride of Wikus van der Merwe’. Safundi 11.1-2 (2010): 156-61.

Moses, M.V., L.V. Graham, J. Marx, G. Gaylard, R. Goodman and S. Helgesson. District 9: a
Roundtable.Safundi 11.1-2 (2010): 155–175.

Nel, Adéle. ‘The Repugnant Appeal of the Abject: Cityscape and Cinematic Corporality in District
9’.Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies 26.4 (2012): 547-69.

Schaab, Benjamin, ‘Metastases of Capitalism: Humanism as Exploitation in District 9’, Humanitas

(2012), 99-116

Smith, Eric. D., Globalization, Utopia and Postcolonial Science Fiction New Maps of Hope (2012)

Van Veuren, Mocke Jansen. ‘Tooth and Nail: Anxious Bodies in Neill
Blomkamp’s District 9’. Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies 26.4 (2012): 570-86.
Wagner. ‘Zones of Regulation, Zones of Despair: District 9, Race and Neoliberalism in Post-
Apartheid Johannesburg’. Race & Class, forthcoming.

Weaver-Hightower. ‘The Postcolonial Hybrid: Neill Blomkamp’s District 9’. Postcolonial Film:
History, Empire, Resistance. Eds. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower and Peter Hume (London:
Routledge, 2014): 247-66.

Zborowski, James. ‘District 9 and its World’. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 52
(2010)
J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace (1999)

J.M.Coetzee in Time

Born John Maxwell Coetzee on February 9, 1940, in Cape Town

In 1957, Coetzee enrolled at the University of Cape Town, where he earned a degree in English in
1960 and a degree in mathematics the following year.

Coetzee spent three years in England, where he began researching the work of Ford Maddox Ford.
He then went to the United States, where he earned a doctorate degree in English from the
University of Texas at Austin in 1968.

First Novel Dusklands, published in South Africa in 1974.

In the Heart of the Country (1977) wins Central News Agency Literary Award in South Africa

Wins the Booker Prize for The Life and Times of Michael K (1984)

Foe (1986), The Master of St.Petersburg (1994), Boyhood (1997)

Wins the Booker again with Disgrace (1999)

Youth (2002); Emigrates to Adelaide, Australia.

Nobel Prize (2003); Citation “an author who in innumerable guises portrays the surprising
involvement of the outsider [….] a fundamental theme in Coetzee's novels involves the values and
conduct resulting from South Africa's apartheid system, which, in his view, could arise
anywhere.”

Elizabeth Costello (2003); Slow Man (2005); Diary of a Bad Year (2007); Summertime (2009); Childhood of
Jesus (2013).

Ends and Beginnings

The overriding question for many readers is: does this novel, as one of the most widely
disseminated and forceful representations of post-apartheid South Africa, impede the difficult
enterprise of rebuilding the country? Does the largely negative picture it paints of relations
between communities hinder the steps being made towards reconciliation? (Derek Attridge, ‘Age
of Bronze’)

In an oral submission to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) of inquiry into
racism in the media, made on 5 April 2000, the ANC used Disgrace as an historical witness to the
persistence of racism among white South Africans. In it, they claimed, Coetzee ‘reported on’ the
still pervasive idea of the black as a ‘faithless, immoral, uneducated, incapacitated primitive child,’
a version of the white racism they traced back to J.B.M. Hertzog, the father of ‘so-called pure
Afrikaner nationalism’. (Peter Macdonald, ‘Disgrace Effects)

‘You people had it easier. I mean, whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, at least you
knew where you were.’ (Disgrace, 9)
Dogs and a gun; bread in the oven and a crop in the earth [….] But perhaps it was not they who
produced her: perhaps history had the larger share. (Disgrace, 60-1)

‘It was never safe, and it’s not an idea, good or bad. I’m not going back for the sake of an idea. I’m
just going back.’ (Disgrace, 105)

He and Bev does not speak. he has learned by now , from her, to concentrate all his attention on
the animal they are killing, giving it what he no longer has difficulty in calling by its proper name:
love [….]’Are you giving him up?’ ‘Yes, I am giving him up.’ (Disgrace 219-220)

Generation Wars

On this reading, the rape has different consequences for Lucy, which also, however, centre on the
ethics of redress – indeed, more convincingly so in her case. It serves, above all, to give her
decision to stay in South Africa and on the farm, which her father never fully understands, the
weight the story demands. As an expression not simply of the racist ‘history of wrong’ to which
her father alludes, but also of the patriarchal exploitation he fails at first to see, the rape is
overdetermined when seen from Lucy’s perspective [….] Her sexuality is also relevant. Soon after
the rape, David, already feeling an ‘outsider’ as a man, is reported as thinking: ‘Raping a lesbian is
worse than raping a virgin: more of a blow. Did they know what they were up to, those men? Had
the word got around?’ (p. 105). Establishing an intricate tangle of ties based on race, gender, and
sexuality, the rape separates Lucy from David still further by bringing her identity as a lesbian
woman sharply into focus. No simple idea of ‘sides’ suffices in her case. If the rape makes sense as
an act of revenge on the part of her attackers for the horrors of apartheid, it can also be understood
in patriarchal terms. (Peter Macdonald, ‘Disgrace Effects’)

This essay offers the quotidian everywhere-ness of violence as mundanacity, a concept defined here
as the process by which the unrelenting-ness of post-apartheid violence renders attacks on the
individual body and the national psyche as nothing more than a mundane, ordinary experience.
Mundanacity is post-apartheid violence normalized, incorporated into the South African psyche as
an everyday, routine possibility because it takes place with such great frequency and speed. It is a
concept that derives from the tenacity – the intensity and the tenseness – of the encounter between
black and white, between men and women, and between the past and the present (in the cause of
an as-yet-undefined future). (Grant Farred, ‘The Mundanicity of Violence’)

No matter what passes between them now, they will have to meet again as teacher and pupil. Is he
prepared for that? (Disgrace, 12)

Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core. (Disgrace, 25)

Yet perhaps she has a point. Perhaps is the right of young to be protected from the sight of their
elders in throes of passion. That is what whores are for, after all; to put up with the ecstasies of the
unlovely. (Disgrace, 44)

The marriage of Cronus and Harmony; unnatural [….] If the olden hog the young women, what
will be the future of the species? That, at the bottom, was the case for the prosecution. (Disgrace,
190)

‘In the old days one could have had it out with Petrus [….] Petrus is no longer, strictly speaking,
hired help. It is hard to say what Petrus is, strictly speaking. The word that seems to serve best,
however, is neighbour. (Disgrace, 116)
‘Stay with your own kind.’ Your own kind: who is this boy to tell him who his kinds are? (Disgrace,
194)

You say? You will protect her?’

‘I will protect her [….] I know. I am telling you. I know.’ (Disgrace, 139)

‘It was so personal,’ she says. ‘It was done with such personal hatred [….] The shock of being
hated, I mean. In the act.’ (Disgrace, 156)

Texts and Trials

Of confession Paul de Man (explicating Rousseau, Coetzee 1992 :267) writes: "Each new stage in
the unveiling suggests a deeper shame, a greater impossibility to reveal, and a greater satisfaction
in outwitting this impossibility." Hinging on the twin concepts of "truth" and "sincerity”, “truth-
telling and self-recognition, deception and self-deception” are problems which will undermine the
rehabilitation of the confessant. Absolution, or “reconciliation”, as the “indispensible goal of all
confession”, involves negotiation between, and healing in, both victim and abuser alike, and
entails the “liberation from the oppression of memory.” (Jane Poyner, ‘Truth and Reconciliation’)

Because he has no respect for the material teaches, he makes no impressions on his students. They
look through him when he speaks, forgets his name. Their indifference galls him more than he will
admit. (Disgrace, 4)

The question is not, How can we keep the imagination pure, protected from the onslaughts of
reality? The question has to be, Can we find a way for the two to coexist? [….] Enough! He is sick
of the sound of his own voice, and sorry for her too, having to listen to these covert intimacies.
(Disgrace, 22-3)

‘I don’t need representation. I can represent myself perfectly well. Do I understand that, despite
the plea I have entered, we must continue with the hearing?’ (Disgrace, 41-2)

‘Repentance is neither here nor there. Repentance belongs to another world, to another universe of
discourse.’ (Disgrace, 55)

And, astonishingly, in dribs and drabs, the music comes [….] It is not the erotic that is calling to
him after all, nor the elegiac, but the comic. (Disgrace, 184)

Farm Animals

In his essay ‘Farm Novel and Plaasroman’, Coetzee distinguishes between the English-language
farm novel and the plassroman proper, the Afrikaner novel of idealised rural and farm life [….] In
the essay Coetzee considers the anti-pastoralism of Olive Schreiber and the idealistic pastoral of
Pauline Smith [….] A point that he makes about Schreiber’s Story of an African Farm, given its
symbolic impetus, is that it makes no attempts to engage with the materiality of farm life and the
process of wealth production: life on Schreiber’s farm is the life of insects rather than of sheep.
(Dominic Head, J.M.Coetzee)

Because the African farm has a split nature, it is impossible to live an integrated life upon it. Either
one lives on the inhospitable land [….] and perishes, or one lives in the farmhouse and succumbs
at last to adulthood [….] The African farm is thus Schriener’s microcosm of colonial South Africa: a
tiny society in the middle of the vastness of nature, living a close-minded and self-satisfied
existence. (J.M. Coetzee, ‘Farm Novel and Plaasroman in South Africa’)

The Western townsman in fact approaches country life with the demand that it be edifying and is
disappointed when it is not. Writers (as distinct from folk-artists) do not emerge from the
peasantry [….] Therefore, all recourse to the peasantry tends to be a version of pastoral, sharing in
the anxiety of high pastoralism about the moral justification of such a going back. (J.M. Coetzee,
‘Farm Novel and Plaasroman in South Africa)

In his critique of the genre in Lingua Franca, Adam Begley succinctly outlines the basic components
of the academic novel [….] On every campus in every decade, there’s the urgent need for new funds,
issues of academic freedom, worries about hiring and admissions, quotas, petty jealousies, endless inter- and
intra-departmental squabbles. Descriptions of the scholarly temperament are amusingly constant. It seems
that they’ve been stamping out social scientists with the same cookie cutter for half a century. Ditto for
English professors. The students are elemental, as unvarying as earth and fire [….] Many academic novels
also place great emphasis on sexual adventures of all types, though most show the results of such
escapades to be harmful, if not disastrous. (Robert F Scott, ‘It’s a Small World After All: Assessing
the Contemporary Campus Novel’ 2004)

As with his treatment of artistic creation, Coetzee strips away all the conventional justifications for
kindness to animals – implying not that these are empty justifications, but that they are part of the
rational, humanist culture that doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. Indeed, the heart of the
matter, the full and profound registering of animal existence that Coetzee is using his own art to
evoke, constitutes, like art, a fierce challenge to that culture. (Derek Attridge, ‘Age of Bronze’)

Might one approach a doctor and ask for it? A simple enough operation, surely: they do it to
animals every day, and animals survive well enough, if one ignores a certain residue of sadness.
(Disgrace, 9)

‘ ‘But desire is another story. No animal will accept the justice of being punished for following its
instincts’. (Disgrace, 90)

‘But it is true. They are not going to lead me to a higher life, and the reason is, there is no higher
life. This is the only life there is. Which we share with animals.’ [….] ‘We are of a different order of
creation from the animals. Not higher, necessarily, just different.’ (Disgrace, 74)

Should he mourn? Is it proper to mourn the death of beings who do not practise mourning among
themselves?’ (Disgrace, 127)

‘With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity.

‘Like a dog.’

‘Yes, like a dog.’ (Disgrace, 205)

Selected Reading
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Saunders, Rebecca.‘Disgrace in the Time of a Truth Commission’. Parallax 11.3 (2005): 99-106.
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Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)

Timeline

• Born in 1971 in Lahore, Pakistan; moved to the US at the age of 18 to study at Princeton
University and Harvard Law School; worked as a management consultant in New York,
and later as a freelance journalist back in Lahore.

• First novel: Moth Smoke (2000), winner of a Betty Trask Award and shortlisted for the
PEN/Hemingway Award. Moth Smoke was made into a television mini-series in
Pakistan and an operetta in Italy, and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in
2000.

• Second novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was published and shortlisted for the 2007
Man Booker Prize for Fiction. In 2008, it won the South Bank Show Annual Award for
Literature and was shortlisted for the 2008 Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia
Region, Best Book) and the 2008 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction). A short
story based on the novel was also published in The Paris Review in 2006.

• Third novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013) won the Tiziano Terzani
International Literary Prize and was shortlisted for the KLF Embassy of France Prize and
the Haus der Kulturen der Welt International Literature Award. He has also published a
book of essays entitled Discontent and Its Civilisations: Despatches from Lahore (2014).

Address

Then there is the matter of the novel’s form. It is written as a dramatic monologue and is
heavily influenced by Albert Camus’s existentialist novella about guilt and confession
from 1956, The Fall, also a dramatic monologue with an egotistical narrator. Camus’s text
deals with mid‐ century ennui and masculine disorientation which have traditionally been
read as having universal resonance. Hamid’s novel, by contrast, traces the experience of
alienation and estrangement to a particular historical trigger and a set of political
responses. Nonetheless, the two books share a fascination with the gap between
appearance and reality, particularly when it comes to pseudo‐ autobiographical tracts and
memoirs [….] In that respect, it could be claimed that The Reluctant Fundamentalist is falsely
polyphonic; we “hear” the voices of Erica, Jim, Wainwright et al., but they are all
ventriloquized by Changez, who may well be an unreliable narrator and whose story has
its own political rationale and relentless momentum. When it comes to our usual
expectations and hermeneutic reading pleasures, The Reluctant Fundamentalist can be
understood as the novel‐ as‐ hoax (Peter Morey, ‘The rules of the game have changed’)

‘Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be
frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America’ (1).

‘Night is deepening around us, and despite the lights above this market, your face is
mostly in shadow […] Your ears must be exhausted; the time has come to employ your
tongue – for taste, if nothing more, although I hope you can be persuaded to speak!’ (87).
As far as the voice is concerned, the narrator, Changez, speaks in a kind of a strange
accent. It is an oddly anachronistic, almost British-sounding but yet undeniably Pakistani
form and it’s an accent that I picked up just out of memory. In Pakistan there is a strange
phenomenon that happens to some of us from a particular social background who begin to
speak an ‘English’ which is very formal, almost more British than the British. This
language form is often used as a way of asserting a kind of class background. You know, I
speak in this way because I'm from a very ‘good family’. So it is a means of denoting
status within the Lahore caste-class system which becomes particularly pressing if your
‘good family’ has fallen on hard times. In such cases, the assertion that ‘I'm from a good
family’ becomes essential [….]Also, there is something vaguely menacing about this false
politeness. Politeness in Pakistan does two things: it establishes hospitality – one can't
generalise for 116 million people but in my travels all over Pakistan, no matter how poor
the village, the hospitality one tends to encounter is really profound. It is also a means of
establishing a barrier and a distance between you and the person you are being polite to.
Changez is very polite partly because he is possibly being menacing to the American. So
the reason why The Reluctant Fundamentalist is written in this tone with an emphasis on a
particular Pakistani accent or dialect of English is because it resonates with many Western
preconceptions about Islam, or about people from the Muslim world that they belong to
something that is anachronistic, which is from the past, something overly formalised’
(Amina Yaqin, ‘Mohsin Hamid in Conversation’).

Between North and South

As already suggested, the firm of Underwood Samson embodies a utilitarian version of

the melting pot, thus highlighting a national culture determined to assimilate difference
only as past, as history. If heritage is not converted to history and basically discarded, as is
the case with Changez, who after September 11 insists on wearing a beard as a marker of
his Pakistani identity, then integration on any terms is no longer possible. The novel thus
dramatises the absolute claim that American culture places on its newly arrived
immigrants, a claim that remains peculiarly indifferent to the dynamics of cultural
exchange that might recognise the values brought to America by its migrant population.
While many European nations do, of course, place similar demands on new immigrants,
the American experience distinguishes itself by incorporating a racist and xenophobic
aversion to difference with the more appealing sense that shedding “old world” difference
is precisely what becoming American is all about. That America seems to embody these
push and pull factors simultaneously for the ostensible outsider is, I suggest, what makes
it so enticing for Changez (Anna Hartnell, ‘Moving Through America’).
‘When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings – younger, I later
learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and
ingenious stonemasonry to look older – and thought, This a dream come true‘ (3).

‘On that day, I did not think of myself as a Pakistani, but as an Underwood Samson
trainee, and my firm’s impressive offices made me proud. I wished I could show my
parents and my brother! I stood still, taking in the vista’ (39).
‘At Princeton, learning was imbued with an aura of creativity; at Underwood Samson,
creativity was not excised […] but it ceded its primacy to efficiency’ (41).

‘I was struck at first by how shabby our house appeared, with cracks running through its
ceiling [….] This was where I came from, this was my provenance, and it smacked of
lowliness’ (141).

‘“Does it trouble you,” he inquired, “to make your living by disrupting the lives of
others?” [….] They were ferocious and utterly loyal: they had fought to erase their own
civilizations, so they had nothing else to turn to’ (171-2).

Hamid’s work of fiction replies directly and cleverly to George W. Bush’s question, ‘why
do they hate us?’ even while exploring the reverse (if asymmetrical) question, ‘why do we
fear them?’ In the process, the novel layers the complex, contradictory relationships to the
US that the world bears: as a means to personal upward mobility, a center of global
finance capital, a dangerous imperial power, an object of romantic attachment, and finally,
an object of intelligible hatred [….] I argue that contemplating The Reluctant
Fundamentalist as a worldly American novel leads to a substantive revision of both what
we mean by ’world’ and what we mean by ‘American’ in the context of post-9/11
literature. Making reference to Giovanni Arrighi’s illuminating world-economic analyses, I
suggest that Hamid’s novel belongs to a current mode of world literature engaged by the
transitional moment associated with Arrighi’s sense of the ‘terminal crisis’ in American
world-system hegemony (Leerom Medovoi, ‘Terminal Crisis?’)

Global Connections

In each era of capitalism’s development, Arrighi argues, a hegemonic power (a state or

empire) has used its political and military force to establish a world-spatial arrangement
within which a certain regime of capital accumulation can proceed. Arrighi argues that, in
fact, there have been four such phases: a Genoese, Dutch, British, and finally an American
moment of global hegemony. Each time, however, the ‘world’ created by that power
reaches a structural limit to the capital accumulation it can accommodate.

In these transitional moments, finance capital ascends to the foreground, traveling the
globe to seek the outlines of a new spatial configuration. Like Jim in Hamid’s novel,
Arrighi reads finance as if it were a rush of blood seeking a new historical outlet. For a
time, the incumbent hegemon may wage a political and military rearguard action against
the siphoning away of its economic dominance, but in the end that power has always lost
out (sometimes cataclysmically) to emerging sites of capital accumulation that offer an
even larger ‘spatial fix’ for capitalism than their predecessor (Leerom Medevoi, ‘Terminal
Crisis? 26). Arrighi interprets Bush’s wars and the neo-conservative push to establish a
“second American century” very much within this framework, as a military venture that
has futilely sought to stave off, perhaps for another half a century or so, a notable decline
in American global hegemony whose “signal crisis” was the loss of the Vietnam War, and
for whom the post-9/11 situation represents its “terminal crisis” (‘Terminal Crisis?)
‘Our situation is, perhaps, not so different from that of the old European aristocracy in the
nineteenth century [….] Except, of course, that we are part of a broader malaise afflicting
not only the formerly rich but much of the formerly middle-class as well’ (12).

‘I […] found myself wondering by what quirk of human history my companions – many
of whom I would have regarded as upstarts in my own country, so devoid of refinement
were they – were in a position to conduct themselves in the world as though they were its
ruling class’ (24).

‘I tried not to dwell on the comparison; it was one thing to accept that New York was more
wealthy than Lahore, but quite another to swallow the fact that Manila was as well’ (73-4).

‘I too had travelled far that January, but the home of Neruda did not feel as removed from
Lahore as it actually was [….] in spirit it seemed only an imaginary caravan ride away
from my city, or a sail by night down the Ravi and Indus’ (167).

Intimate enemies

‘I have said before that our love for the west flows out of a concept of the west […] It has
survived the brutalities of the Portuguese armada, the intrigues of Robert Clive, the
viciousness of the counter-insurgency in 1857-58 and the callousness that caused the
Bengal famine of 1943. The fact that the most devastating wars in human history and the
atrocities of Nazism, Fascism and apartheid took place in the 20th century and were
integral to the historical dynamics of modern Europe has not, for us, pushed that concept
to a crisis. Large sections of our elites still repose enough faith in that concept to insist that
we should strive harder than we have so far to copy those old models of modernity in our
own country. I am convinced that the concept of the west that we have so lovingly
nourished is in deep crisis in the west itself’ (Partha Chatterjee, ‘Five Hundred Years’).

‘Another policeman walked into the room and asked for an update. “Is he understanding
everything? And he just killed two men?”

Hours earlier, Davis had been navigating dense traffic in Lahore, his thick frame wedged into the
driver’s seat of a white Honda Civic. A city once ruled by Mughals, Sikhs and the British, Lahore is
Pakistan’s cultural and intellectual capital, and for nearly a decade it had been on the fringes of
America’s secret war in Pakistan. But the map of Islamic militancy inside Pakistan had been
redrawn in recent years, and factions that once had little contact with one another had cemented
new alliances in response to the C.I.A.’s drone campaign in the western mountains. Groups that
had focused most of their energies dreaming up bloody attacks against India were now aligning
themselves closer to Al Qaeda and other organizations with a thirst for global jihad. Some of these
groups had deep roots in Lahore, which was why Davis and a C.I.A. team set up operations from a
safe house in the city.

But now Davis was sitting in a Lahore police station, having shot two young men who approached
his car on a black motorcycle, their guns drawn, at an intersection congested with cars, bicycles and
rickshaws. Davis took his semiautomatic Glock pistol and shot through the windshield, shattering
the glass and hitting one of the men numerous times. As the other man fled, Davis got out of his car
and shot several rounds into his back.
He radioed the American Consulate for help, and within minutes a Toyota Land Cruiser was in
sight, careering in the wrong direction down a one-way street. But the S.U.V. struck and killed a
young Pakistani motorcyclist and then drove away. An assortment of bizarre paraphernalia was
found, including a black mask, approximately 100 bullets and a piece of cloth bearing an American
flag. The camera inside Davis’s car contained photos of Pakistani military installations, taken
surreptitiously’ (Mark Mazetti, ‘How a Single Spy Helped Turn Pakistan Against the
United States’, New York Times Magazine, April 9, 2013).

‘But as I continued to watch, I realized that it was not fiction but news. I stared as one –
and then the other – of the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center collapsed. And
then I smiled’ (82-3).

‘The entrance between her legs was wet and dilated, but at the same time oddly rigid; it
reminded me – unwillingly – of a wound, giving our sex a violent undertone despite the
gentleness with which I attempted to move’ (120).

‘But his dislike was so obvious, so intimate, that it got under my skin’ (76).

‘If you have ever, sir, been through the breakup of a romantic relationship that involved
great love, you will perhaps understand what I experienced. There is in such situations
usually a moment of passion during which the unthinkable is said; this is followed by a
sense of euphoria at finally being liberated’ (179)

Recorded US drone strikes to date

Pakistan (06/2004-) Yemen (11/2002-)* Somalia

(01/2007-)* Afghanistan (01/2015-)

US drone strikes 421 107-127 15-19

48

Total reported killed 2,476-3,989 492-725 25-108

420-619

Civilians reported killed 423-965 65-101 0-5

14-42

Children reported killed 172-207 8-9 0

0-18

Reported injured 1,158-1,738 94-223 2-7

24-28

(The Bureau of Investigative Journalism:

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2015/10/05/monthly-drone-report-total-
drone-strikes-under-obama-in-pakistan-somalia-and-yemen-now-491-after-september-
attacks/)
Selected Reading

Braz, A. ‘9/11, 9/11: Chile and Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist’, Canadian
Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne De Littérature Comparée 42.3 (2015), pp.
241-56.

Chatterjee, Partha. ‘Five Hundred Years of Fear and Love’, Economic and Political Weekly
33.2 (May 30-June 5), pp. 1330-6.

Darda, J. ‘Precarious world: Rethinking global fiction in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant
Fundamentalist’, Mosaic 47.3 (2014), pp. 107-22.

Ilott, S. ‘Generic frameworks and active readership in The Reluctant Fundamentalist’, Journal
of Postcolonial Writing 50.5 (2014), pp. 571-83.

Hart, Matthew and Jim Hansen. ‘Introduction: Contemporary Literature and the State’,
Contemporary Literature 49.4 (2008), pp. 491-513.

Hartnell, Anna. ‘Moving Through America: Race, Place and Resistance in Mohsin Hamid’s
The Reluctant Fundamentalist’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 46.3-4 (2010), pp. 336-48.

Hutton, M. ‘The Janus and the Janissary: Reading into Camus’s La Chute and Hamid's The
Reluctant Fundamentalist’, Comparative Literature 68.1 (2016), pp. 59-74.

Medovoi, Leerom. ‘Terminal Crisis? From the Worlding of American Literature to World-
System Literature’, American Literary History 23.3 (2011), pp. 643-59.

Morey, Peter. ‘“The rules of the game have changed”: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant
Fundamentalist and post-9/11 fiction’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 47.2 (2011), pp. 135-46.

Munos, D. ‘Possessed by Whiteness: Interracial Affiliations and Racial Melancholia in

Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 48.4 (2012),
pp. 396-405.

Perner, C. ‘Tracing the fundamentalist in Mohsin Hamid's Moth Smoke and The Reluctant
Fundamentalist’, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 41.3-4 (2010), pp. 23-31.

Rothberg, Michael. ‘A Failure of the Imagination: Diagnosing the Post-9/11 Novel: A

Response to Richard Gray’, American Literary History 21.1 (2009), pp. 152-8.

Singh, H. ‘Deconstructing terror: Interview with Mohsin Hamid on The Reluctant

Fundamentalist, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 42.2 (2011), pp. 149-56.

Walkowitz, Rebecca L. ‘Comparison Literature’, New Literary History 40.3 (2009), pp. 567-
82

Yassin-Kassab, Robin. ‘Islam in the Writing Process’, Religion & Literature 43.1 (2011), pp.
139-44.

Yaqin, Amina. ‘Mohsin Hamid in Conversation’, Wasafiri, 23.2 (2008), pp. 44-49.
Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (1969)

Salih in Time

Tayeb Salih (born in 1929, died February 17, 2009), was one of Sudanese’s most prolific
and iconic novelists. He died in London from complications related to a kidney condition.
He was 80 years old.

Salih was born at a village in North Sudan in 1929 and moved to the Khartoum for his
bachelors’ degree. He then traveled to UK to receive a degree in international affairs.

During his stay in London, Salih worked at the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
Arabic service and managed to' become the head of the drama division at a record young
age.

The Sudanese novelist also worked for the Information ministry in Qatar and the United
Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) headquarters in
Paris.

Salih is best known for his masterpiece Season of Migration to the North written in 1966
which deals with the perceptions of people in the third world to the West. The novel was
translated to a number of world languages and a subject of intense debate inside and
outside Sudan.

It was also selected by a panel of Arab writers and critics as the most important Arab
novel of the twentieth century.

Owing to sexually explicit portions of the novel the Sudanese authorities banned the book
in the 90s. The Sudanese novelist at the time said the decision is similar to ‘locking the
stable after the horse already gone’.

Story Telling

The narrators of both works are language experts: one holds a Ph.D. in English poetry and
teaches pre-Islamic literature, while the other earns his living as a translator. There is also
a distinct metafictional aspect to these novels. (John E. Davidson, ‘In Search of a Middle
Point’)

The two distinctive but interrelated stories of Mustafa Sa’eed and the narrator during their
migrations to the north are told in the hieratic oral style of a hakawati, a public teller of
tales in the Arab world. The traditional beginning, ‘You will recall, gentlemen...’ is echoed
by the narrator in the novel’s first line (‘It was, gentlemen, after a long absence . . .that I
returned to my people’), and repeated in the course of his recitation to auditors apparently
unfamiliar with both the obscure village on the Nile and cosmopolitan London. This
conceit permits a storyteller licensed to combine fact and fable and speak in riddles, to
include in his delivery description, transcription, digression and reflections on life and
death. Moreover the deployment of this popular mode coexists, as Barbara Harlow has
suggested, with mimicry of the Arabic literary technique of mu-arada (or mucdradah), a
form literally meaning opposition or contradiction in which at least two voices participate,
the first composing a poem that the second will undo by writing along the same lines, but
reversing the meaning. In this way, Season tells two interrelated but contrasting stories,
one about deracination and intemperance and the other about rootedness and restraint.
(Benita Parry, ‘Reflections on the Excesses of Empire’)

‘It was, gentlemen, after a long absence – seven years to be exact, during which time I was
studying in Europe – that I returned to my people [….] I listened intently to the wind: that
indeed was a sound well known to me, a sound which in our village possessed a merry
whispering – the sound of the wind passing through palm trees is different from when it
passes through fields of corn’ (1-2).

‘I thus have one request to make of you – that you promise me on your honour, that you
swear to me, you won’t divulge to a soul anything of what I’m going to tell you tonight
[….] It’s a long story, but I won’t tell you everything. Some details won’t be of great
interest to you, while others [….]’ (17-19).

‘First of all I shall see and hear, and then I shall burn it down as though it had never been.
The books - I could see in the light of the lamp that they were arranged in categories.
Books on economics, history and literature. Zoology. Geology. Mathematics. Astronomy.
[….] Not a single Arabic book. A graveyard. A mausoleum. An insane idea. A prison. A
huge joke. A treasure chamber’ (153).

‘The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at
rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the
only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an

interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a
joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide
seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished
sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air
was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful
gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

The Director of Companies was our captain and our host. We four affectionately
watched his back as he stood in the bows looking to seaward. On the whole river there
was nothing that looked half so nautical. He resembled a pilot, which to a seaman is
trustworthiness personified. It was difficult to realize his work was not out there in the
luminous estuary, but behind him, within the brooding gloom.

Between us there was, as I have already said somewhere, the bond of the sea.
Besides holding our hearts together through long periods of separation, it had the effect of
making us tolerant of each other's yarns—and even convictions [….] “And this also,” said
Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.”’ (Joseph Conrad, Heart of
Darkness)
Imagining Europe

The journey of Mustafa Sa’eed [….] echoes Kurtz’s journey, but in reverse. It is a journey
from Africa to Europe, from the South to the North, and in specific terms from the Equator
to Victoria Station, near the Thames where Marlow sat like a Buddha [….] Kurtz in the
Congo is a colonizer and invader. MS announces himself in England as conqueror and
invader. (Mohammad Shaheen, ‘Tayib Salih and Conrad’)

If postcolonial Arabic discourse has been centered on the debate between traditionalism
and Westernism, Season of Migration to the North shatters the very terms of this
opposition and explodes the dualism developed before and during the Nahda. (Saree
Makdisi, ‘The Empire Renarrated’)

‘They were surprised when I told them that Europeans were, with minor differences,
exactly like them [….] I preferred not to say the rest that had come to my mind: that just
like us they are born and die, and in the journey from the cradle t the grave they dream
dreams some of which come true and some of which are frustrated’. (3)

‘In her eyes I was the symbol of all her hankerings. I am the South that yearns for the
North and the ice. Anne Hammond spent her childhood at a convent school. Her aunt was
the wife of a Member of Parliament. In my bed I transformed into a harlot’. (30)

‘You, my lady, may not know, but you - like Carnarvon when he entered Tutankhamen’s
tomb - have been infected with a deadly disease which has come from you know not
where and which will bring about your destruction [….] Doubtless one of my forefathers
was a soldier in Tarik ibn Ziyad’s army. Doubtless he met one of your ancestors as she
gathered in the grapes from an orchard in Seville’. (42)

‘When Mahmoud Wad Ahmad was brought in shackles to Kitchener after his defeat at the
battle of Atbara, Kitchener said to him, “Why have you come to my country to lay waste
and plunder?” It was the intruder who said this to the person whose land it was, and the
owner of the land bowed his head and said nothing. So let it be with me’. (94)

Embodied violence

In Mustafa Sa’eed’s liaison with Jean Morris a contaminated eroticism is joined to

colonialist rage when in the course of their murderous sexual games the Englishwoman,
who expresses her passion by insulting her lover’s physical appearance, destroys, amongst
other valuable objects, a rare Arabic manuscript and an antique Isfahan prayer rug, both
symbols of his culture. A relationship dominated by psychic humiliation and the infliction
of physical pain reaches its climax when Mustafa Sa’eed in response to her entreaties and
driven by his own frenzy, stabs Jean Morris, the sexually-consummated death
remembered by him as a moment of ecstasy (Benita Parry. ‘Reflections on the Excess of
Empire’).

Everything which happened before my meeting her was a premonition; everything I did
after I killed her was an apology, not for killing her, but for the lie that was my life. (29)
My bedroom became a theatre of war; my bed a patch of hell [….] The city was
transformed into an extraordinary woman, [….] The infection had stricken these women a
thousand years ago, but I had stirred up the latent depths of the disease until it had got
out of control and had killed. (34)

Slowly I pressed down. Slowly. She opened her eyes [….] I could feel the hot blood
gushing from her chest. I began crushing my chest against her as she called out
imploringly: “Come with me. Come with me. Don’t let me go alone” (164-5).

The old oppressive order that had been in place since Islam came to the region has been
disrupted. Wad Rayyes is killed; Bint Majzoub has talked of the unmentionable; the
grandfather approaches one hundred and will not live much longer. The British have been
there and left their marks, for the room of Mustafa Sa’eed and the water pumps cannot be
denied, nor can they be uprooted [….] Hosna is dead, but no longer can a woman be
looked on merely as property or raped without second thought. (John E. Davidson, ‘In
Search of a Middle Point’)

I imagined Hosna Bint Mahmoud, Mustafa Sa’eed’s widow, as being the same woman in
both instances: two white, wide-open thighs in London, and a woman groaning before
dawn in an obscure village on a bend of the Nile under the weight of the aged Wad
Rayyes. If that other thing was evil, this too was evil [….] (86-7)

The red straw mat was swimming in blood. I raised the lamp and saw that every inch of
Bint Mahmoud’s body was covered with bites and scratches [….] Wad Rayyes had been
stabbed more than ten times – in his stomach, chest, face, and between his thighs. (126-7)

Developmentality
While Evans-Pritchard was conducting his now-famous studies of the Azande and the
Nuer in southern Sudan, changes were taking place in the great plains between the two
Niles south of Khartoum that would forever alter the course of Sudanese history. In
partnership with multinational capital, the British were turning millions of acres inhabited
by farmers and pastoralists into a vast irrigation project dedicated to the production of
cotton. The Gezira Scheme, which ultimately became the largest centrally-managed
irrigation project in the world, started operations in 1925 and continues to operate today
under the management of the Sudanese government [….] If […] one views the mission of
colonialism as that of literally and figuratively creating a world order and ordering the
world, the Gezira Scheme is a stunning exemplar. Its miles and miles of irrigation canals
and uniform fields stretched out in a huge grid dominate space, its rigid schedules for

agricultural operations command time, and above all, its hierarchy of inspectors and
bureaucrats supervising, documenting, and disciplining strive to control the people of
Gezira. (Victoria Bernal, ‘The Gezira Scheme and “Modern Sudan”)

From my position under the tree I saw the village slowly undergo a change: the
waterwheels disappeared to be replaced on the bank of the Nile by pumps, each one doing
the work of a hundred water-wheels [….] looked at the river - its waters had begun to take
on a cloudy look with the alluvial mud brought down by the rains that must have poured
in torrents on the hills of Ethiopia [….] I feel that I am important, that I am continuous,
and integral. (4-5)
The retired Mamur was snoring away fast asleep when the train passed by the Sennar
Dam, which the English had built in 1925 [….] Poor Mustafa Sa’eed. He was supposed to
make his mark in the world of Commissioners and Mamurs, yet he hadn’t even found
himself a grave to rest his body in […] (54)

Over there is like here, neither better nor worse. But I am from here [….] The fact that they
came to our land, I know not why, does that mean we should poison our present and our
future? Sooner or later they will leave our country [….] The railways, ships, hospitals,
factories and schools will be ours and we’ll speak their language without either a sense of
guilt or a sense of gratitude. Once again we shall be as we were - ordinary people - and if
we were lies we shall be lies of our own making. Such thoughts accompanied me to my
bed and thereafter to Khartoum, where I took up my work in the Department of
Education. (49-50)

We pass by a red brick building on the Nile bank, half finished, and when I ask them
about it my uncle Abdul Mannan says, ‘A hospital. They’ve been at it for a whole year and
can’t finish it.’ [….] In fact a group of people in an old lorry passes us shouting, ‘Long live
the National Democratic Socialist Party.’ Are these the people who are called peasants in
books? (64)

“Aren’t we human beings? Don’t we pay taxes? [….] He will not believe the facts about
the new rulers of Africa, smooth of face, lupine of mouth, their hands gleaming with rings
of precious stones [….] with shoes that reflect the light from chandeliers and squeak as
they tread on marble. (118-19)

How strange! How ironic! Just because a man has been created on the Equator some mad
people regard him as a slave, others as a god. Where lies the mean? Where the middle
way? (108)

It is not my concern whether or not life has meaning. If I am unable to forgive, then I shall
try to forget. I shall live by force and cunning. (168-9)
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