ABSTRACT
Transversal cosmopolitanism resists both the hegemony and homogeneity of globalization by highlighting incommensurable cultural difference, fostering creative appropriation, and promoting alternative systems of belief or idioms. Transnational eclecticism occupies the same cultural pathways as globalization, but at every point its relation to the hegemonic flow is transversal, oblique rather than oppositional, offering a potential for change that affects both elements in a correspondence. The post-9/11 novel expresses a transversal politics that exposes the différend which resists translation into a single global idiom and whose characters become cosmopolites, or global citizens, who instigate a shared deterritorialization. I read four novels that traverse the fractious relationship between Islam and the West. Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011) and Laila Halaby’s Once in a Promised Land (2007) confront the profiling and backlash against Muslims in America after 9/11. The protagonists of both novels are well-educated professionals and nonobservant Muslims who are forced to reconsider their citizenship, their practices, and their faith. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Dave Eggers’ A Hologram for the King (2012) reconsider the American abroad who is naïf (Arabic jahiliyya) in his encounter with the other and guilty of the civilized savaging of a foreign land. All four protagonists migrate from the US to become global citizens.
