KAMILA SHAMSIE’S HOME FIRE: NEO-RACISM AND THE ‘HOUSE MUSLIM’

Home Fire (2017) by Kamila Shamsie fictionally reveals the security concernsand identity crises of British Muslims through the represented experiences of its minor andmajor characters from a Muslim background and literalises the process in which the‘otherised’ struggle to be recognised, acknowledged and included through the reconstitutionof the ‘self’ in relation to the discursively ‘legitimate’ narratives of the mainstream ‘white’society. In the novel, the Muslim characters who perform the requirements of a ‘proper’Muslim image are accepted into the neo-colonial centre, while those who do not fit into the‘proper’ Muslim image are demonised and criminalised. Considering the conditional inclusionof the ‘otherised’, this article will, in this context, attempt to investigate the operation of neoracism in postmodern capitalism and focus on the construction of acceptable othernesswithin the context of the discursive hegemony of orientalist epistemological formations. Thearticle will also attempt to contribute to and develop Hamid Dabashi’s concept of the ‘houseMuslim’ in order to articulate the cultural and ideological interpellation of the Muslim colonialsubject into the dominant logic of the metropolitan culture.