Pakistani fiction is inherently internationalist, facing at least two ways

Evidence

Thus, Pakistani literature has always, by necessity, been inherently internationalist in outlook. It grows from soil watered by the streams of global realpolitik and is nurtured and shaped by the fact that the country was carved out of preexisting regional cultures with little in common beyond a will to believe in the new nation. Salman Rushdie has famously accounted for Pakistan’s failures by suggesting the country is “insufficiently imagined.” It may perhaps be truer to say that Pakistani literary imaginings are instead haunted by all the other national and regional imaginings through and against which the Pakistani sense of nation has been constructed. Indeed, Pakistani fiction has always by necessity been international in its concerns and themes—facing at least two ways. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 392

Categorization

• XREF: This ‘facing at least two ways’ formulation maps directly onto Hamid’s Changez straddling Lahore and New York in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Naqvi’s Home Boy protagonizing between Karachi and Brooklyn.
• DEFINE: Defines the double consciousness or bifocal stance that characterizes the Pakistani novel, giving the reader a precise critical term for analyzing diasporic fiction.