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Mohsin HamidThe Last White Man: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Mohsin Hamid
Twice nominated for the Booker Prize, Mohsin Hamid is the author of five novels and one collection of essays. Hamid was born in Pakistan and is of Punjabi and Kashmiri descent. Hamid is also a British citizen, and he attended Princeton University and Harvard Law School. His novels are experimental in style, using narrative techniques such as second-person narration, multiple voices, or extended dramatic monologue. His genre choices and genre elements include mock self-help guides and magical realism. Magical realism allows for an alternate reality expressed from a non-dominant or non-Western perspective. Hamid’s novels engage with themes that challenge hegemonic positions of privilege that intersect with race, ethnicity, class, and national identity. His first novel shattered the conventions of English-language subcontinental writing, which was firmly situated in a postcolonial framework of nationalism.
Indian novelist Anita Desai claimed that Hamid represented the zamana of the 21st-century subcontinent (Desai, Anita. “Passion in Lahore.” The New York Review, 21 Dec. 2000). This Urdu term is similar to the concept of zeitgeist or cultural climate of an era. Hamid takes themes such as identity, racism, migration, and loss and adds contemporary themes of terrorism, nuclear tensions, the attacks of 9/11, and increasing racialized cultural divides. Several critics have described his style as “hip-hop,” combining repetitive run-on sentences that perform interior monologues of characters in rhythmic ways. His most recent novel, The Last White Man, continues many of the Hamid characteristics but moves out of the postcolonial, subcontinental framework of his four earlier texts. Although the setting of this allegorical novel is an unnamed city, it has both a universal yet decidedly North American feel. Not only are the protagonists, Anders and Oona, a gym trainer and yoga instructor, respectively, but the racialized violence, gun-sporting militia, and mobs are identifiable problems of 21st-century America. However, the larger themes of the novel—Loss and Mourning and the possibility of redemption through love—are also present in his corpus of works.
Literary Context: Magical Realism
Magical realism is a literary genre from Latin America that spread to the Indian subcontinent in the early-to-mid 20th century. There are five basic characteristics: realistic setting, magical elements, limited information, societal critique, and unique or unusual plot structure (“What Is Magical Realism?” MasterClass, 23 Aug. 2021). Unlike fantasy, magical realism does not explain the mechanics of the magic: In The Last White Man, the characters do not question how or why the change happens, nor does the narrative explain this phenomenon. Like allegory, magical realism performs political, moral, or cultural critique as part of its core purpose. An allegory is a narrative that functions on two levels and uses symbols to convey the hidden or ulterior meaning. Allegories are often described as extended metaphors, with famous examples including George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) and Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches (1961). Many critics argue that magical realist novels are allegories of postcolonial history. Allegories, however, do not need to connect to postcolonial history or use elements of magical realism.
The Last White Man differs from other contemporary novels of magical realism that typically connect to postcolonial concerns of identity and nation. In many cases of Latin American and Subcontinental fiction, the life and struggles of the protagonist mirrors those of the nation, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) or Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). While themes of racism and white supremacy are present in Hamid’s text, the typical accompanying themes of colonization, migration, or identity not entirely dependent on racial features are absent. Texts that use allegory or magical realism to express societal critique do so indirectly. The narratives, and narrators, are often ambiguous or unreliable, such as the narrator of Hamid’s novel or Saleem Sinai of Rushdie’s novel. This oblique approach to criticism is sometimes used to avoid censorship or the treatment of controversial or sensitive topics; as such, it might be more palatable to a North-American audience re-examining its racial past and present.
Ideological Context: Post-9/11 Racism and Discrimination
Although The Last White Man was published in 2022, the genesis for this story dates back to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Hamid explains that:
After 9/11, my racial category became much less neutral; people would get nervous when you got onto the subway, and it felt like something out there had changed, but that I myself hadn’t changed. I had a feeling of loss, that I wanted to go back to how things were before, but also the realization that I was complicit in the system. There were always people who were experiencing this assumption of threat, but it’s just that up until then I hadn’t been experiencing it — so is that really the system I want to go back to? (Rankin, Seija. “Author Mohsin Hamid on His New Novel, Working With Riz Ahmed and the Value of a Limited Series.” The Hollywood Reporter, 2 Aug. 2022).
In this brief statement, Hamid identifies key themes of race, loss, and complicity. The post-9/11 climate of the US has reified xenophobic tendencies within American society and culture. Then, President Bush declared a “global war on terror.” In the US, politicians and law enforcement marginalized and criminalized immigrants and citizens visibly “Other” through legislation and discriminatory measures such as “immigration registrations, sweeps and deportations, racial and religious profiling, mass surveillance, and the militarization of local police departments” (“The 9/11 Effect.” Center for Constitutional Rights, 2 Sept. 2021).
Moreover, increased police violence—and violence in general—against marginalized communities has been a major source of conflict in American society in the 2020s.
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