Perceptions of the Other are always filtered through one’s own cultural narrative forms.

Evidence

In fact, just as its characters draw closer to one another as they cross and recross borders, so, too, the novel itself enacts its own transgressions in generic terms with the aim of exploring what unites cultures as well as what divides them. As Skelly and Najeeb travel deeper into Afghanistan, the textual elements come more and more to resemble those of that preeminent narrative form of the forging of America at its frontiers, the Western. Skelly experiences an unexpected familiarity not only through those unbidden intrusions of memory but also because his experiences have the quality of the already read—even to him. So, for example, our protagonists are forced to witness the summary justice meted out to those judged traitors when the captured leader of a raiding party and his deputies are lynched (352–53). By this point, we have come to realize that what we are reading is in fact an archetypal frontier narrative—a sort of transcultural Western (an Eastern Western, if you will)—complete with raiding parties, nights spent around campfires under the stars, ambushes in rocky ravines, banditry, warring tribes, and makeshift gallows. … The aim of all this is not so much to indicate a simple intercultural resemblance or to suggest that Afghanistan resembles the United States of 150 years earlier. Rather, it is to reveal how our perceptions of the Other are always fashioned with the cultural tools we have available to us. In Skelly’s case, these tools include imperial adventure fiction and the cowboy films and serials beloved of mid-twentieth-century popular culture. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 351

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the concept of the transcultural or Eastern Western as a genre hybridization tool for reading the Other.
• XREF: Connects to Morey’s broader claim that fiction both borrows and contests Orientalist frames — the very contest-vs-reinforce distinction the reader is tracing through Hamid and Naqvi. — connects to: Deep stories provide culturally rooted lenses for interpreting social worlds. — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 228; Taken-for-granted cultural narratives exert the most power — Andrew L. Whitehead, American Idolatry, 143
• SEED: Angle: how Naqvi’s Home Boy might similarly use imported American genre tropes (gangster film, post-9/11 thriller) to fashion the Other — as a lens onto whether he contests or reinforces.
• ADDENDUM: Parallel to the grafting essay’s argument that narratives transplant cultural tools across borders — Here genre itself is the grafted rootstock.