: ‘The Last White Man’: Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel is a redemptive fable about race and identity #IndiaNEWS “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable

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‘The Last White Man’: Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel is a redemptive fable about race and identity #IndiaNEWS
“One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.� With this Kafkaesque beginning, we are plunged into the fable-like world of Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel.Like all great fantasies, random, uncontrollable change is at the heart of The Last White man. Hamid conjures up a world where whiteness is vanishing. Like Kafka, Hamid is not interested in why the change is happening, but only on the consequences of this random, seemingly irreversible change.Anders is not an isolated case, and soon there are reports of others changing as well. This inevitably leads to violence, with vigilante gangs trying to control the transformation by gunning down those who have changed, while some adamantly deny the change that is taking place. Violence and mutiny becomes rampant, with pale skinned militants becoming a common sight in the town.The experience of being ‘othered’In Hamid’s last offering, Exit West, a similar inexplicable change took place when mysterious portals started appearing for migrants to travel from one country to another, which served as an allegory for the lack of agency migrants face. The conceit in The Last White Man works in a similar vein and causes us to vicariously live the experience of being “othered�.In the epilogue, Hamid described the...Read more

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