The post-9/11 anglophone Pakistani novel, human rights and empathy in the literary marketplace

The Post-9/11 Anglophone Pakistani Novel, Human Rights and Empathy in the Literary Marketplace argues that the focus on human rights in the most prominent post-9/11 anglophone Pakistani novels is connected to the positioning of world literature as a vehicle for empathy in the Anglo-American contemporary world literary marketplace. It introduces the idea of the empathy industry, where the world literary marketplace highlights human rights discourse in novels concerned with the Global South. Combining cultural materialism, postcolonialism and world literature with scepticism about the function of literature as a tool for cross-cultural empathy, this thesis examines a selection of anglophone Pakistani novels alongside their real and imagined audiences in light of theoretical claims within literary theory, political theory and philosophy. The central texts—Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire and Best of Friends, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways, Nadeem Aslam’s The Golden Legend and Mohammed Hanif’s Our Lady of Alice Bhatti—are chosen for the prominence of their writers within the category of anglophone Pakistani writing. These texts share a desire to better the world through representations of human rights. The nature of these representations, however, is, to varying degrees, manufactured for a Global North readership. This study examines the ways in which empathy functions in contemporary world literature through the case of the post-9/11 anglophone Pakistani novel.