ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to demonstrate how Changez and Hiroko stage a critique of White American exceptionalism to suggest a reimagining of trauma in the post-9/11 context. In such a domain of American and Pakistani national politics in the novel, women and domestic values are viewed as threats to the supreme individualism of the heroic leader, and in this final frontier of the masculine space, Changez becomes the reluctant fundamentalist. Although Shamsie frames an intricate narrative of the shared histories of the two migrant and heterosexual families, the dynamics of the Hiroko-Sajjad-Raza family are illustrated differently from those of the Elizabeth-James-Harry family. While the third-person narration and plurality of women's migratory experiences in BS further Shamsie's feminist agendas, in TRF, Erica is introduced by Changez and it is in her feminised body that an allegory of America is embedded.
