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Pedagogy and Protest in The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Thu, November 9, 12:00 to 1:45pm, Hyatt Regency Chicago, McCormick, Third Floor West Tower

Abstract

This presentation performs a cultural studies analysis of the pedagogies of dissent embedded within Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and how they affect both the novel’s reader and its main character, an international student from Pakistan. I argue that Hamid’s novel illustrates a political economy of global higher education shaped by neoliberalism in which international students (seeking self-realization) consume higher education as a product. At the same time, those students are themselves packaged and consumed by forces of capital both academic and corporate; e.g. packaged as a revenue stream, touted as a marker of diversity, and marketed as a global human resource to corporate recruiters. The narrator of The Reluctant Fundamentalist learns to recognize and then to resist the forces of neoliberalism that are taught through the university and operationalized post-graduation in the business of transnational financial valuation. The social conditions and pedagogical mechanisms that spark the narrator’s awakening and radicalization, along with the novel’s formal features (e.g. second-person narration), become the mechanisms that potentially work to awaken the reader. As protest literature, the novel offers us a prophecy and a call to action, illustrating modes of resistance for graduates and professors alike, both within and without academia.

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