Hello everybody!

This week’s blogs were our last ASTU blogs. Some reflected on Mohsin Hamid’s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Peter Morey’s academic article “’The rules of the game have changed’ Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and post-9/11 fiction”, while others reflected on the whole academic year and their analysis on what it means to be a ‘global citizen’.

First, I would like to introduce some of those who looked at The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Isabelle interpreted The Reluctant Fundamentalist from a critical standpoint, in which she focused on Hamid’s portrayal of Changez rejoicing when the Twin Towers was attacked. She states this depiction and portrayal of Muslims is far from being accurate, and could have an extremely harmful effect to Muslims and minorities in general who live in America today. She argues this because she believes that it gives many Americans and American politicians an excuse to hold false conceptions toward Muslims.

Nicola and Taylor looked into the structure of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, although from different perspectives. Nicola focused on the romantic storyline between Changez, the main protagonist, and Erica, the American girl she falls in love with. She believes that, on the one hand, Erica could possibly be an allegorical character that Changez created, in order to map out something that he wanted to convey to the American he is talking to throughout the story; on the other hand, however, the story’s characters could be all seen as allegorical, which would make the source and recipient of the message not Changez and the American in the novel, but instead Hamid and us, the readers. Either way, the romance that is depicted in the novel creates an interesting margin for personal interpretation of the story’s structure for the readers. Taylor examined the structure through Morey’s article. After reading Morey’s interpretation of Hamid’s use of dramatic dialog, she realized that this highly subjective manner of conveying message to the readers leaves many questions intentionally, because there is no “right” answer to this topic. As she states, “Changez’s character and the form of the novel are meant to destabilize our assumptions.”

Many others commented on their growth through what we have done in the CAP course, as Peijia did. She reflected on how her perception of what the term ‘global citizen’ meant to this course as a whole. She referred to the VICE documentary on waste polluting the ocean that we had watched in our sociology lecture, and how the people in the documentary were looking for tangible evidence of pollution in the ocean such as islands of waste, only to fail to do so. To her, this was similar to what she had experienced in the CAP course. Each individual course did not seem related much to ‘global citizenship’, but she soon found out that the subjects supplemented each other in a way that exposed her to new and different perspectives. The whole stream connected together the dots and created the whole picture of what we were to learn.

I would like to use this space to thank everyone for everything this year. I know we still have some time left this term, but this will be my last post on here. It has really been an up and down year for me, as everything was a new experience for me. Coming from a normal Japanese school, the leap to an English speaking academic environment was a struggle for me, and I really am ashamed of myself for not being able to contribute to class more. I am so grateful for everybody being so supportive and sharing your intellectual knowledge with me. I hope to continue forging a great relationship with all of you.

Thank you,

Ken Sakamoto