The postcolonial condition now applies primarily to Muslims under Western surveillance

Evidence

In fact, “the postcolonial” is a description of our contemporary world condition, not a set of theories or an identity. It sums up life for many who wrestle with the legacy of historical colonialism and find their place in the world still acted on by controlling impulses of the powerful nations of the West. It also encompasses the willed amnesia with which these privileged First World nations continue to blame contemporary problems on recidivism or “fundamentalism,” read as inherent in subject peoples and nations, just as it was in the days of empire. Indeed, postcolonial perspectives have become even more salient in a post-9/11 world, where the justification and tactics of Western domination have reemerged with renewed force. Such tactics are focused primarily on Muslim citizens and nations and are composed of the classic colonial staples of surveillance: bodily disciplining; restrictions on movements; the giving, withholding, and withdrawing of citizenship and opportunity; and potential relegation to disposable infrahuman status in a global economy of rights that is skewed and partial. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 52

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gives a strong working definition of ‘the postcolonial’ as a lived world condition rather than a theory or identity.
• XREF: The listed colonial staples — surveillance, bodily disciplining, restricted movement, citizenship games, disposable infrahuman status — map directly onto the treatment of Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist and of the Pakistani characters in Home Boy.
• SEED: Could anchor an essay framing Hamid and Naqvi’s protagonists as evidence that the ‘postcolonial condition’ now names the treatment of Muslim citizens inside the West, not only former colonies.