Global surveillance creates identities that can be criminalized at will

Evidence

In these conditions, Raza at last comes to understand the literal impact of a world order that treats communities and sometimes whole nations as expendable. In search of adventure and a place in the world, he has intermittently concocted alternative identities for himself, becoming “Raza Hazara” as a youth in order to experience the exhilaration of serving the anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan with his new friend Abdullah, but subsequently styling himself “Raza Konrad” when he sells his services to the private security firm of Arkwright and Glenn. As Harry shrewdly observes, Raza’s reshaping is a “reflexive act rather than an adaptive response” to circumstances (282). Yet Harry cynically cultivates these protean qualities, the sense of rootlessness in the young man. After his own faintly ludicrous pseudocolonial attempts at undercover activity, Harry identifies in the young Raza—with his mixed heritage—the same potential to “pass” effectively in the conflict zones of South Asia as Kipling’s fin de siècle boy spy, Kim. He fails to consider the price that must be paid for a permanently itinerant sense of self, serving a distant and indiscriminate power. … When Raza is falsely charged with having a hand in the assassination of Harry, Raza recognizes that he, as a Pakistani national, has always been powerless—like those “TCNs” (third-country nationals) conscripted to fight for U.S. interests in Afghanistan but who are objects of suspicion, discriminated against even in the funerary rights they are granted after death. In deciding to flee rather than participate in a rushed, unaccountable judicial process that is already loaded against him, Raza embraces his provisionality and begins a process of “unbecoming” (308), ditching the documents that make him legal but traceable. He is forced into an awareness that all identities, approved and vilified, exist only by dint of global technologies of control: “One phone call … and he would enter data banks the world over as a suspected terrorist. His bank accounts frozen. His mother’s phone tapped. His emails and phone logs, his Internet traffic, his credit card receipts: no longer the markers of his daily life … but a different kind of evidence entirely” (307). His only redemption is to change places with his now hunted friend Abdullah, donning his coat so as to be identified and detained as an illegal Muslim immigrant of dubious motives, with all the inevitable consequences in the Age of Terror: a selfless act of heroism leading to a different kind of martyrdom. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 433

Categorization

• QUESTION: The distinction between a ‘reflexive act’ vs ‘adaptive response’ to identity is a key analytic term I want to deploy precisely — what exactly makes Raza’s reshaping reflexive rather than adaptive, in Harry’s framing?
• XREF: Directly relevant to The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamid) — Changez also shapes and sheds identities amid post-9/11 suspicion; Morey’s reading of Raza’s provisionality and ‘unbecoming’ gives me vocabulary for Changez’s own self-fashioning and flight from surveillance.
• SEED: Angle: the ‘reflexive vs adaptive’ identity distinction as a lens for comparing how Hamid and Naqvi stage their protagonists’ response to the Age of Terror — Raza unmakes himself, but does Changez?