Belonging, Loyalty, and Displacement: a Postcolonial Study of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017)
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article offers a postcolonial reading of Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017), a Women’s Prize–winning reworking of Sophocles’ Antigone set among British Muslims of Pakistani descent. It asks how the novel portrays displacement and the search for belonging, how it dramatizes the collision between familial and religious loyalty and loyalty to the state, and how it deploys postcolonial hybridity to unsettle fixed conceptions of national identity and citizenship. Reading the Pasha siblings—Isma, Aneeka, and Parvaiz—alongside the assimilated Home Secretary Karamat Lone and his son Eamonn, the study draws on Homi K. Bhabha’s account of hybridity, mimicry, and the “unhomely,” and on Giorgio Agamben’s theory of sovereign power, the state of exception, and “bare life.” It argues that Shamsie stages belonging as conditional and revocable for the racialized Muslim subject: the airport interrogation, the surveillance encoded in the phrase “Googling While Muslim,” and the stripping of Parvaiz’s citizenship reveal a citizenship that functions less as a birthright than as a sovereign privilege. Hybridity in the novel is double-edged—both a creative in-between space and, in Karamat’s mimicry, a demand for self-erasure. The article concludes that Home Fire refuses the consolations of assimilation, exposing the exclusions on which the nation’s promise of inclusion rests.
DOI: 10.68156/a2hatb92
Authors: Dilshad Kausar, Dr. Saleem Akhtar Dhera
Institutions: Riphah International University, Government of Punjab
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7222689478