The Post-Post Colonial Condition: Globalization and Historical Allegory in Mohsin Hamid's Moth Smoke‪.‬

I. Locked Out of the Kitchen With its sustained focus on the effects of economic globalization, Mohsin Hamid's Moth Smoke stands apart from many South Asian English-language novels popular with readers and academics in the West. While the fiction of Bharati Mukerjee, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Chandra, Ardashir Vakil, Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri and Manil Suri deals tangentially with economic change, these writers are primarily interested in the nature of cultural production and identity in an increasingly hybridized postcolonial world. Some of these texts are set in South Asia and deal explicitly with the postcolonial condition. In The God of Small Things, for example, Roy writes about the myriad cultural dislocations visited on her characters by British colonialism, and she develops a sustained examination of Anglophilia as a cultural phenomenon in India. (1) Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain offers an exhaustive analysis of the cultural effects on India of the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the rise of the British Raj. (2) Other writers of South Asian descent working in the West, like Mukherjee and Lahiri, have written principally about diasporic experience, about the cultural dislocations that accompany migration, immigration, or exile. (3) Many of their stories are either set in the United States or depict (as does Suri's The Death of Vishnu) an India profoundly disrupted at the cultural level by colonization. Economic change and material conditions connected to colonization and postcolonization play a role in each of these texts, but the emphasis in most of them is on the cultural effects of British colonialism as they continue to manifest themselves under postcolonialism.