THIRD –WORLD VOICES IN THE FIRST-WORLD METROPOLIS: CLASS, IDEOLOGY AND THE IMPERIAL GAZE IN H.M. NAQVI’S “HOME BOY”: A MARXIST STUDY

Abstract

The study explores “Home Boy” (2009) by H. M. Naqvi using the overlapping lenses of Marxist theory and the Postcolonial theory, and concludes that the novel provides an incisive examination of the way global capitalism and the ideology of imperialism define the lived experience of Pakistani Muslim immigrants in post-9/11 New York City. The analysis places the narrative in the context of wider frameworks of economic disparity and cultural domination, showing how identity is framed and bound in imperial spaces. Based on the concept of Fredric Jameson referring to the first-world/third-world dichotomy in metropolitan centers and the theory offered by Louis Althusser to dependent relationships as ideological interpellation, the article proves how the ambitions of the main characters concerning the rise in social ranks become methodically disrupted. Their efforts to become part of the American society is interrupted by racialized and religiously coded imperial gaze that reinvents them as preputial outsiders, despite their ambitions to gain a higher class or fitting into the American culture. The research also resonates with the recent literature on precarity as a structural effect of capitalism, the neoliberalization of surveillance, and the necropolis of the carceral. It shows how the environment created after 9/11 exacerbates these processes, turning the aspiration of assimilation into an alienate state, in which belonging becomes more and more impossible. Finally, this study places “Home Boy” as a critical text in the contemporary South Asian literature that has shown how it reveals the imbalanced nature of global capitalism and the calcification of colonial structures of power in the societies that proclaim itself to be democratic.