Kamila Shamsie’s Transnational Households and the Intimate Violence of the State

Abstract:Against Nancy Armstrong’s recent contention that contemporary novelists have “declared the household obsolete as a way of imagining national community,” I analyze Kamila Shamsie’s attention to fractures in the nation-state in the era of transnational mobility and affiliations in Home Fire (2017) and Burnt Shadows (2009), works that make the household central. I argue that what initially seems a paradoxical figure for exploring the transnational actually proves able to capture key features of transnationalism and of the attendant transformation of liberal-democratic states in the current moment. Rather than serving to naturalize the political constitution of the liberal democratic state and banish ascriptive distinctions and exclusions to the periphery of the domestic imagination, in Shamsie’s hands the household serves both as utopian counter-narrative and as a means of tracing the long history of the liberal state’s repressed and intimate violence up to the entrenched divides and political impasses of our current moment.