NECROPOLITICS AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN KAMILA SHAMSIE’S HOME FIRE

Abstract

In Home Fire (2017), Kamilla Shamsie approaches themes such as the instability of national identity for minorities as well as islamophobia and racism. By adapting Sophocles’ Antigone to a contemporary setting, she reimagines the contrast between the law laid down by the gods and the law enforced by men to introduce a discussion about the discrepancies between law and justice in twenty-first-century Britain. To discuss how Shamsie presents the tensions between the State and ethnical and religious minorities, this article will analyse her novel under the light of Decolonial studies. Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics (2003) will support a discussion of how Shamsie’s plot illustrates the instability of the rule of law for the colonised, while Boaventura de Sousa Santos’s conception of “abyssal thought” (2007) will allow us to investigate the structures that uphold patterns of inequality and institutionalised violence against minorities, one of the novel’s main themes.

Keywords: Decolonial Theory. British Literature. Necropolitics.