The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Reframing The Reluctant Fundamentalist through Empire, Hybridity, and Post-9/11 Geopolitics
A. Pre-Watching Analysis
1. Critical Reading & Reflection
Ania Loomba situates the “New American Empire” within the framework of globalisation, where power is no longer exercised solely by territorial nation-states but also by transnational institutions, corporations, and military alliances. Hardt & Negri’s Empire extends this by proposing that in the postmodern global order, the enemy is no longer a rival nation but a figure framed as a threat to the moral and legal order the “terrorist” or “criminal.” These frameworks are crucial for reading The Reluctant Fundamentalist because Changez’s experience is precisely about moving from being an insider in the structures of “Empire” to becoming its suspect outsider.
In the film, the U.S. is not just a nation it operates as part of a global network that polices, surveils, and disciplines perceived threats anywhere in the world. Underwood Samson, Changez’s employer, is emblematic of the corporate arm of Empire, where profit is the sole “fundamental.” Simultaneously, the film shows the banalisation and absolutisation of the “enemy” after 9/11: Changez’s strip-search at the airport and FBI interrogation reflect systemic suspicion, while his Pakistani identity becomes an unshakable marker of difference.
Hybridity in Changez’s character Princeton-educated, fluent in American culture yet deeply tied to Pakistani values demonstrates both the attraction and alienation inherent in the “third space” (Bhabha). Post-9/11 geopolitics reconfigures him from cosmopolitan success story to potential threat. The film’s framing device a tense interview between Changez and journalist Bobby Lincoln further embodies the dialogue, mistrust, and manipulation characteristic of the global order described by Loomba and Hardt & Negri.
Thus, The Reluctant Fundamentalist becomes a meditation on the individual caught in the web of global Empire, navigating competing fundamentalist discourses: religious, corporate, and national security-driven.
Hardt and Negri similarly reframe power as Empire a postmodern order that isn’t simply the U.S. flag planted abroad but a mixed, supranational constitution of rule. In their terms, classic inter-national wars recede; enemies are recoded as criminals/terrorists threatened by and threatening the law rather than a rival nation. Sovereignty becomes distributed across a “monarchy/oligarchy/democracy” assemblage (from great powers, Bretton Woods/IMF/WTO/NATO and multinationals to NGOs/UN), producing a totalizing horizon that still leaves deep inequalities intact.
Read together, Loomba and Hardt-Negri pivot us from “West vs. Rest” to a mesh of states, markets, media, security regimes, and civil society, in which identities get commodified, securitized, and contested. That lens clarifies The Reluctant Fundamentalist: Changez’s life is brokered by Princeton, Wall Street, airports, visa regimes, galleries, and the CIA apparatuses of Empire that alternately seduce, surveil, and eject him. The film’s cross-border mise-en-scène Lahore cafés, Istanbul publishing houses, New York boardrooms plays out Loomba’s insistence that culture/economy and law/violence are braided. It also stages Hardt & Negri’s “double move”: the opponent is banalized (subject to routine policing) and absolutized (terrorist), which neatly maps onto Changez’s profiling, strip search, and CIA suspicion after 9/11.
2. Contextual Research
Mohsin Hamid began writing The Reluctant Fundamentalist before 9/11, intending to explore themes of ambition, identity, and cultural negotiation. However, the 9/11 attacks profoundly altered the political and social landscape, reframing Muslim identities in the West under suspicion and surveillance. Completing the novel after the attacks allowed Hamid to embed the global shift in perception directly into the narrative.
This shift is crucial: Changez’s story becomes not just about personal ambition and love, but about the rupture of trust between East and West. The novel’s dramatic monologue captures the ambiguity and paranoia of the post-9/11 world, while the film visualises this tension through framing, mise-en-scène, and cross-cultural encounters. Hamid’s timing ensured that the text became a direct engagement with the rhetoric of the “War on Terror” and the lived consequences of being Pakistani or Muslim in a world where Empire redefined who belonged and who was suspect.
Mohsin Hamid drafted The Reluctant Fundamentalist before 9/11 (first draft July 2001) and then reworked it afterward; he has discussed how the attacks changed the novel’s tone, structure, and the central listener’s role. The Guardian The significance is twofold. First, the project resists retrofitting a “terrorism story”; it began as a corporate-era romance/disillusionment and became, post-9/11, a meditation on suspicion, securitization, and the perceptual regime that reads brown, bearded men as enemies. Second, the pre/post bifurcation mirrors Changez’s arc: the “American Dream” seduction gives way to the Empire afterlife of airport interrogations, surveillance, and criminalization. That compositional history legitimates the novel/film’s dialogic structure: neither a nationalistic screed nor a terrorist apologia, but an exploration of how global events reorganize intimacy, labor, mobility, and self-narration.
B. While-Watching Analysis
1. Character Conflicts & Themes
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Generational Split: Changez’s father, a poet in Lahore, embodies cultural and artistic heritage, valuing words and introspection over material gain. In contrast, Changez initially embraces the ethos of Underwood Samson efficiency, profit, and results symbolising the seduction of corporate modernity. This tension plays out subtly in Changez’s rediscovery of his father’s translated poetry in Istanbul, sparking his disillusionment with profit-driven logic.
Generational/poetic vs. corporate modernity. Changez’s father (a poet of modest means) embodies a non-market value system; Changez’s rise at Underwood Samson (US) enacts the valuation of everything by discount cash flow. The Istanbul sequence sharpens this: a storied publishing house holds cultural capital but little profit. Changez’s refusal to shutter it marks a turn from “profit fundamentalism” to a defense of knowledge and literary heritage—an ethics that owes as much to his father’s world as to his own awakening.
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Changez & Erica: Erica’s character represents both personal intimacy and cultural estrangement. Her lingering grief over her deceased boyfriend and her use of Changez’s personal details in her art reflect the objectification of the “exotic other,” a form of re-orientalism where personal and cultural narratives are appropriated without true understanding.
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Profit vs. Knowledge: The Istanbul scenes provide a powerful metaphor the valuation of a publishing house purely in financial terms versus the preservation of cultural heritage. Changez’s decision to protect the company affirms a break from the commodification of art and culture.
2. Title Significance & Dual Fundamentalism
The title’s “reluctance” speaks to Changez’s ambivalence toward both violent extremism and corporate absolutism. The film draws a parallel between Islamic fundamentalism and the fundamentalist pursuit of profit at Underwood Samson both reduce the world to non-negotiable “fundamentals,” stripping away nuance and humanity. Changez rejects both, positioning himself in a morally complex space outside these binaries.
The film literalizes the novel’s pun: “fundamentalism” is not only religious zeal but also corporate devotion to “fundamentals”US’s mantra to “focus on fundamentals.” That parallel is made explicit when Changez hears nearly identical phrasing from his boss and later from militants. The visual grammar glass-walled offices, security checkpoints, prayer rugs, boardrooms conjoins two disciplines that reduce complex lives to simple metrics (profit or purity). Changez’s reluctance shows up in mid-career moral friction (Istanbul) and in Lahore when he declines recruitment by militants; he resists both fundamentalisms.
3. Empire Narratives
The film’s visual language surveillance shots, tense close-ups, and shifting urban landscapes communicates the paranoia of the post-9/11 global order. Spaces such as the Lahore café or the protest-filled streets operate as zones of ambiguity, where dialogue can be genuine or manipulative, and where resistance is always shadowed by the threat of violence. These liminal spaces mirror the “borderless” Empire described by Hardt & Negri, where power and suspicion transcend national boundaries.
C. Post-Watching Reflections
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The film attempts to create spaces for reconciliation the interview itself is a platform for dialogue yet the tragic ending suggests that mistrust remains deeply entrenched.
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Nair’s adaptation partially translates the novel’s ambiguity, but the cinematic medium necessitates more overt emotional cues, which sometimes reduces the novel’s subtle tension.
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Changez is both a figure of resistance and a victim of Empire. His resistance lies in reclaiming his identity and rejecting exploitative systems, but his victimhood is evident in how global politics mark him as a perpetual suspect.
Reconciliation or stereotype? Nair repeatedly opens dialogic spaces (the long café conversation; Changez’s eulogy) that seek reconciliation, yet the CIA/kidnapping frame risks reinscribing a security gaze. Whether the film reconciles or re-stereotypes finally depends on whether viewers credit Changez’s testimony or default to the thriller’s demand for a culprit.
Adapting monologue/ambiguity to cinema. The novel’s dramatic monologue and radical ambiguity (who is the American listener? is Changez dangerous?) are translated into a dialogue with a named interlocutor (Bobby Lincoln) plus a kidnap plot. This gives cinema urgency but inevitably narrows indeterminacy; still, cross-cutting and off-screen sound keep uncertainty alive. The SpoolThird Cinema revisited
Changez: resistance, victim, both or neither? Both. He’s victimized by profiling and securitization and he exercises agency by exiting Wall Street, teaching, and speaking publicly against U.S. policy. That doubleness is the point: resistance here is ethical refusal inside Empire’s circuits, not a clean outside.
2. Short Analytical Essay (Condensed)
Using postcolonial theory, the film can be read as a negotiation of identity in the “third space,” where hybridity offers potential for cross-cultural understanding but also exposes vulnerability. Orientalist and re-orientalist gazes are evident in how Erica, the media, and the CIA interpret Changez reducing him to a representative of an imagined, monolithic East. Visual strategies, such as alternating warm tones in Lahore and cold, sterile palettes in New York, reinforce the cultural and ideological divide. The film resists simple binaries, showing that “Empire” operates not only through military and economic might but also through cultural narratives that shape perceptions.
3. Reflective Journal
As a viewer, the film challenges me to reconsider my own assumptions about the “War on Terror” and those caught between worlds. It deepens my understanding of how postcolonial subjects navigate identity under the shadow of global Empire, where both belonging and exclusion are constantly negotiated. Changez’s journey underscores that resistance can be quiet, intellectual, and rooted in reclaiming one’s narrative from systems that seek to define it.
Conclusion
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, seen through the lenses of Loomba’s critique of the New American Empire and Hardt & Negri’s Empire, becomes a layered exploration of post-9/11 identity politics, hybridity, and resistance. Mira Nair’s adaptation visually and thematically engages with the complexities of living under a global order that transcends borders yet reinforces suspicion, making Changez’s story both deeply personal and profoundly political.
References :
The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Directed by Mira Nair. Doha film institute, Mirabai films, 2012.
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