Dissertation Chapter: Wall Street Sons: American Hospitality in H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy

Module: Dissertation (Level 6)

Abstract

This work is an extract from a final year dissertation titled Forgiveness and Hospitality in Post-9/11 South Asian Anglophone Fiction in which Derridean concepts of hospitality and forgiveness are used to examine how Kamila Shamsie, H. M. Naqvi, and Mohsin Hamid address the legacies of 9/11 and the resulting rise in islamophobia and xenophobia. This chapter focuses on H. M. Naqvi's HomeBoy and his deconstruction of the ‘theoretical premise of America’, as well as the relationship between the immigrant guest and the American host. I have highlighted how the novels show how American hospitality is based on the host's ability to capitalise on its guests whilst making comparisons between Hamid and Naqvi and their emphasis on the Wall Street and economic productivity as a condition of American hospitality. Chuck’s performance in Wall St both allows him access to American hospitality and reveals its conditionality. Naqvi's’ novel uses the symbolic nature of the 9/11 attacks on the heart of capitalism in Western Society to highlight the unjust utilization of hospitality in the United States.