Together, all his works show the novelist Mohsin Hamid trying to engage the uneasy dialectic between Pakistan as a place, as a lived experience, and Pakistan as a node in a larger global discourse. Mira Nair, who adapts Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist into film, reaches an aesthetic limitation in her representation of Lahore and replaces the possibilities in that urban space with an intense regionalism that revives culture outside of either colonialism, securitarianism, or the nation-state.
