Transforming the Ich-Du to the Ich-Es: The Migrant as “Terrorist” in Kabir Khan’s New York and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.07

Keywords:

Ich-Du, Ich-Es, Asian migrant, terror narratives, objectification, pathologizing gaze

Abstract

Terror narratives have been characterized by a dialogism where the “normative” I—i.e. the “non-threatening mainstream”—defines and delineates subjects whose identity is centred on their (actual or presumed) location in the terror network. This is especially so in the case of Asian migrants who settle down in Western countries, as their very identity as Asian locates them at a precarious point in the real or imagined “terror network.” The migrant is no longer the Du (Thou), but the Es (It), imparting an identity to the Ich (I), where the Ich denotes the “original” citizens of the country. The transactions of the “I” with the “Thou” and the “It” become significant in the context of Asian immigrants in that, for the dominant mainstream (the “I”), the “terrorist” is an Es/”It” that has gradually marked its transition from the Du/“Thou.” The person of the “terrorist” finds its ontological properties from the gradual movement away from a “Thou” to an “It.” The hitherto unbounded “Thou” is transformed into a definable “It,” by ascribing to her/him a religion, race, colour, nationality and ethnicity. He/she is not confronted, as every “Thou” is, but is rather “experienced” as a source of terror, as an “It.” The paper attempts to explore the transformation of the figure of the “migrant terrorist” from a confronted “Thou” to an “imagined/experienced” “It” through an analysis of New York (2009) by Kabir Khan and Home Fire (2017) by Kamila Shamsie.

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Author Biography

Minu Susan Koshy, Mar Thoma College for Women, Kerala

Minu Susan Koshy currently works as Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Mar Thoma College for Women, Kerala, India. She has published extensively in national and international journals and has served as the resource person at several conferences. Her areas of interest include cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and comparative and world literatures. Her books include Narrating Childhood Trauma: The Quest for Catharsis (DC Books-Expressions, 2015), a translation of the Malayalam anthology Tattoo (Authorspress, 2015) by Jacob Abraham, an edited collection of poems by Elizabeth Kuriakose, titled Gossamer Reveries (Authorspress, 2019) and Mapping the Postcolonial Domestic in the Works of Vargas Llosa and Mukundan: Tales of the Threshold (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020). An edited volume titled When Objects Write Back: Reconceptualizing Material Culture in the Tricontinent is scheduled to be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing later this year.

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Published

2021-11-22

How to Cite

Koshy, M. S. (2021). Transforming the Ich-Du to the Ich-Es: The Migrant as “Terrorist” in Kabir Khan’s New York and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire. Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, (11), 97–105. https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.11.07