Modern Media and Identity in Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire
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Abstract
Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire (2017) serves as a retelling of the classic Greek play Antigone through a modern lens, reframing the conflict at the heart of Antigone as a conflict between the UK Home Secretary and a sister who wants to bring home the body of her ISIS deserter brother. By recasting the characters as British citizens of Pakistani descent, all with different relationships to both their home country and the country of their heritage, the novel examines the implications of recent political controversies related to the right to citizenship in the modern world. This article bridges the gap between the more recent scholarship on Home Fire that focuses on the political or legal issues presented by the novel, and past literary criticism on Shamsie’s older novels that dwells on topics of identity, history, and memory. In order to do so, the article looks at the novel through a postcolonial lens, exploring society’s use of digital media and its role in shaping the identities of the characters. By examining the Western media’s portrayal of the British-Pakistani characters and the relationship between the observer and the observed, this article concludes that the way media works to “other” and confine characters in Home Fire challenges the assertion that the modern world with its supposedly freer forms of communication allows for a freer discourse for all.
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References
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