Home itself becomes uncanny for the Westerner, reversing the Orientalist gaze

Evidence

Of course, it could be objected that the colonial space as uncanny is itself a long-established Orientalist trope. However, the uncanny’s radical potential has been reclaimed by postcolonial critics such as Homi K. Bhabha, for whom it is produced in the process of displacement that is characteristic of migration. Sigmund Freud’s original formulation emphasizes the centrality of foreign-ness and familiarity in the production of the uncanny. He says, “The uncanny [the ‘unhomely’] is what was once familiar [‘homely’].” I would argue that this nexus is also at play in The Warlord’s Son. In the novel, Skelly recalls how watching 9/11 unfold on a TV screen in Radio Shack dislocated him, as the event did millions of Americans. Suddenly, the banal routine of his domestic reporting duties comes to seem meaningless, if not actually sinister. He thinks how for a time he had swapped war reporting for “the local version of Siberia, 40 miles up route 19 to Warren County with its Wal-Marts, belt roads and Assemblies of God.… After so many years he found himself struggling to make sense of his homeland. America, it seemed, had turned into a land of big box stores and hundred-channel cable” (29). Home has become just as unsettling as Peshawar or Jalalabad. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 346

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the uncanny/unhomely nexus: what was once familiar becoming foreign, applied to the colonizer’s homeland rather than the colony.
• XREF: Bhabha’s reclamation of the uncanny in migration connects to the reverse-gaze structure of Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
• QUESTION: Worth investigating: does the estrangement of the American homeland (Wal-Marts, cable channels) parallel Changez’s dislocation in Naqvi or Hamid?