Questioning the Borders of Contemporary US Fiction

H.M. Naqvi’s “Home Boy”, 9/11 and the American Novel

Abstract

This essay investigates the margins of twentieth-century American novel in the light of the increasingly deterritorialized status of US culture and literature – a literature whose borders need to be reconfigured not only in terms of reception, but of creation as well. In particular, the essay focuses on the Pakistani-born author H.M. Naqvi and his first novel, Home Boy (2009) – part immigrant narrative, part Bildungsroman, part 9/11 novel. Rooting Home Boy deep in the American grain and at the same time investigating the construction of Otherness through the protagonist’s “inoutsider” status and perspective, Naqvi explores the potential and the limits of what can be considered as “performative Americaness,” defined not by genealogic or geographical belonging, but by cultural and literary affiliations in the politically and socially unstable scenario of the post-national world