Writing Of The Post-postcolonial Condition In Mohsin Hamid's Moth Smoke

The developments of globalization have fundamentally shortened the distance in the modern world and have people interconnected in unprecedented ways.This has a profound impact on economic relations,social organization and cultural communication.Policies,ideologies,cultures spread across progressively invisible national borders,and exist and move globally in more complicated ways.At present,globalization as a long historical process,which contains the entire span of European imperial expansion,colonization,decolonization and the establishing of postcolonial states,is defined by multinational interaction in all realms of human life.Critics show increasing concern for the post-postcolonial condition as part of globalization,as literary studies have the tendency of shifting from the paradigm of postcolonial studies to the paradigm of globalization studies.Mohsin Hamid(1971-)is a famous Pakistani novelist who divides his time between Pakistan and abroad,living between Lahore,New York and London and becoming a citizen of both Pakistan and Britain.Moth Smoke(2000)is his debut novel and can be read as one of the post-postcolonial fictions,according to the American critic Paul Jay and the author himself.This kind of fictions does not seek to focus on the conditions of postcolonial states,but presents mostly the post-postcolonial condition or the contemporary economic and cultural effects of globalization.Unlike those essays interpreting Hamid's novels from the perspectives of religion,trauma or power relation,this study analyzes Moth Smoke as a contemporary global fiction which is also called a post-postcolonial fiction,on the basis of Paul Jay's discussion of the historical relationship between postcolonial condition and globalization and the post-postcolonial state.Therefore this thesis pays close attention to the influence that globalization has exerted on Pakistani society depicted in the novel through looking at varied local issues associated with globalization in economic and cultural realms,such as uneven distribution of wealth,corruptions and confusion of identity.The thesis consists of five parts.The introduction reviews the present research on Mohsin Hamid and his novels,with emphasis on Moth Smoke.Basic questions concerning globalization are also discussed here including the definition of globalization and the post-postcolonial condition,whether globalization is a historical process or just a contemporary phenomenon and its relationship with post-colonialism.Chapter One argues that Moth Smoke reveals the problem of class division caused by uneven distribution of wealth in Lahore.The division is reflected through Ozi's sharp contrast with Daru's in their employment status and control of the global product – air conditioner.The former lives without worry while the latter struggles for a living.Chapter Two points out the problem of rampant corruption in the banking and other industries resulted from the flow of global capital,knowledge and investment in Lahore.Chapter Three discloses the phenomena of homogenization of urban culture in Lahore and the confusion of identity in an increasingly globalized and hybridized city.In the conclusion part,the thesis summarizes the problems that globalization,as reflected in Moth Smoke,has brought to Lahore.Based on the above analysis,it is not difficult to see that Hamid,despite benefiting from globalization,criticizes the negative effects globalization has brought to the postcolonial city of Lahore.As a result,we can benefit from the author's reflection on economic and cultural issues in this type of postcolonial countries in the era of globalization.It is necessary for Hamid's home country and similar developing countries to shift from the passive involver to the active participant in the globalization,thus finding the solutions to the problems reflected in the novel as soon as possible.