Discourse, Address, and Neo-Colonial Subjectivity: Rereading Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Abstract

This paper revisits Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) as a text of neo-colonial critique, building on a body of postcolonial scholarship that reads Changez's disenchantment through Kwame Nkrumah's theorization of neo-colonialism. Where earlier readings treated neo-colonial power chiefly as theme, this paper argues that Hamid's central formal device i.e., Changez's sustained, silencing monologic address to an unnamed American is itself a linguistic enactment of the very neo-colonial relation the novel critiques. Combining Nkrumah's political-economic framework with insights from discourse analysis on address, deixis, and narrative voice, the paper traces how the novel's recurring “you” positions the American listener, and by extension the Western reader, as the object of an asymmetrical gaze historically reserved for the colonized subject. The novel does not merely narrate neo-colonialism; it restages it at the level of form.