Chapter 24 - Kamila Shamsie

Summary

This chapter explores how contemporary novelist Kamila Shamsie adapts dramatic forms to stage ideological and ethical conflicts in her works, focusing on her acclaimed 2017 novel Home Fire in particular. Through a discussion of Home Fire’s thematic and formal reworking of Sophocles’ Antigone in the context of contemporary debates about citizenship and civil rights in the UK, the chapter investigates the ways in which Shamsie’s novelistic dramatisation of ideas engenders a critique of the politics of belonging in the post-9/11 age. In particular, the chapter focuses on the staging of competing ethical and political demands via interpersonal conflict, the use of multi-perspectival narration to critically refract contemporary concerns about citizenship and civil rights, and the representation of forms of mediation and public discourse in Shamsie’s novel.