State surveillance renders all approved and vilified identities equally fragile

Evidence

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). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 434

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘one phone call’ data-bank passage is a precise instrument for reading Changez’s paranoia in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and how biometric data structures belong to the surveillance apparatus.
• DEEPTHINKING: The point that approved and vilified identities exist only by global technologies of control — identity itself becomes contingent on surveillance — is a dense, paradigm-level observation.