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The Global Imaginary and Contemporary Pakistani Fiction: A Study of Global Capitalist Fundamentalism and Terrorist Ontology in Mohsin Hamid’s “The Reluctant Fundamentalist”

1. Assistant Professor, Department of English, The Women University, Multan, Punjab, Pakistan 2. Professor, Department of English, Bahauddin Zakariya University, Multan, Punjab, Pakistan PAPER INFO ABSTRACT Received: April 08, 2020 Accepted: June 15, 2020 Online: June 30, 2020 Pakistani fiction in English, in recent times, has been resignified and re-contextualized by the forces of the global imaginary, in particular by the authors residing in various parts of the globe, and the national imaginary seems to have been eclipsed or over-shadowed by the global capitalist/imperial forces as well as by the global Islamic discourses. Mohsin Hamid, in “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” (2007), draws parallels between the forces of global capitalist fundamentalism and global religious neofundamentalism to highlight the impact of global imaginary on contemporary Pakistani fiction and also to bring to the fore the fundamentalism inherent in both global discourses. This paper, using Lacanian notion of identification along with Valante’s “The Imaginary Symbolic” (2003) and Roy’s “Neofundamentalism” (2004),probes the process of protagonist’s identification(s) within the framework of global imaginary. Through the study of identificatory relationships, this paper foregrounds the shift in contemporary Pakistani fiction from postcolonial epistemology to terrorist ontology.