The Dawn of Twenty first Century and Pakistan’s “Cultural Complexity”: The Wish Maker (2009) by Ali Sethi

Abstract

The identity issues experienced in a post 9/11 novelby Ali Sethi have a slightly different complexion from most of the contemporary novels focusing on these themes.^[1] A great many, (mostly Pakistani novels) addressing these issues are set against the American background, while only some, take up this issue of identity and impact of 9/11 against the ethnic backdrop of Pakistan; a setting of The Wish Maker (2009), in which some important facets of Pakistani society/ psyche are explored. Disregarding the disparaging connotations^[2] of considering Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi K Bhabha as the “Holy Trinity,” Robert Young observes that though there are many things overlapping in their theories as both Spivak and Bhabha have drawn from Said’s Orientalism, yet they cannot be taken as similar (Young, 1995, pp. 154, 163). Said, in turn is influenced by Michel Foucault’s New Historicism.^[3] The text of the novel under study helps invoking selective features of Foucauldian New Historicism with special emphasis on the factors contributing for hegemony, and aspects of Bhabha’s hybridity theory. Hegemony, New Historicism, and Hybridization, the main concerns of the present century’s global and Anglophonic literature, become the major aspects of exploration for this paper about The Wish Maker (2009) by Ali Sethi.