Loose Canons: The Global Anglophone Novel and the Failures of Universalism

This essay examines In the Light of What We Know, by Zia Haider Rahman (2014. In the Light of What We Know. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Home Fire, by Kamila Shamsie (2017. Home Fire. New York: Riverhead), two texts portraying the geopolitical state of the globe whose formal experimentations signal the shifting political stakes of the anglophone novel in the second decade of the twenty-first century. At the level of content, Rahman and Shamsie’s novels depict ever-deepening rents in Enlightenment-borne concepts of citizenship, statehood, and universalism, explicitly confronting the expansion and destruction wrought by globalization and its hegemonic predecessor, colonialism. At the same time, they practice a kind of formal violence in their stylistic instability. I argue that the content of these texts depicting the politically imperilled state of the world is powerfully reflected in their narrative fractures. Rahman and Shamsie directly interrogate the types of narratives employed to disseminate universalist, democratic ideals across the world, and do so by inverting these ideals entirely. As they progress (and digress), both novels break apart the narrative template which centres the universal subject of history and thereby produces the global aspiration to “acquire” this sort of subjectivity. Distinguishing these two novels from earlier examples of postcolonial literature are the ways they challenge the baseline ideological and epistemological concepts underpinning the sort of modernity which produces the novel as a form. In the Light of What We Know and Home Fire suggest that representing what a “global anglophone” reality might actually look like in the second decade of the twenty-first century necessitates the portrayal of the decadence and failure of universalism in content and form alike.