9/11, 9/11: Chile and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

Abstract

This essay explores the significance of Mohsin Hamid’s bestselling novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist in the historicization of September 11, 2001. Most writers who depict the coordinated attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have been extremely reluctant to suggest the possibility that the event is already historical. That is, that it may have a past, specifically Chile’s US-backed coup d’état of September 11, 1973. Hamid is one of the rare exceptions. In the process, he also contests Henry Kissinger’s dictum that “Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South.”