Specular border journalism questions national allegiance to report cultures nonhierarchically.

Evidence

As his meanderings take him back and forth across the border, Skelly can be seen to be unwittingly taking on the role of the “specular border journalist” proposed by Karim H. Karim. This idea, in turn, draws on an essay by Abdul R. JanMohamed that emphasizes the need for intellectuals to “transcend those deep ideological allegiances to ‘group,’ ‘nation,’ ‘race,’ ‘gender,’ or ‘class’ that lead to the Manichean valorisation of one side and the reciprocal devaluation of the other.” Lamenting the parochial, unquestioning patriotism that swept over American journalism in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Karim for his part advocates a new type of journalism, kicking against the demands of simple national interest and based on critical self-consciousness and cultural disengagement to allow for a global, nonhierarchical kind of reporting. Karim says: “The foreign correspondent, by learning to question the essentialist bases of her own socialization and placing herself in the Other’s shoes, could genuinely begin to understand the people she is covering. The ideal of specular border journalism has the potential for providing genuinely global narratives that are not monolithic but pluralist, in which cultures are not arranged hierarchically.” — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 352

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘specular border journalism’ — a usable critical term for analyzing how a protagonist-narrator positions himself relative to national and cultural loyalties.
• XREF: Gives a vocabulary for the narrator position in The Reluctant Fundamentalist — Changez straddles nations much as the specular border journalist is asked to.