Marketing Otherness: A Re-Orientalist gaze into Pakistani fiction with focus on Trespassing and Typhoon

Abstract

This paper, drawing upon the works of Graham Huggans’
The Postcolonial Exotic and Lisa Lau’s Re-Orientalism: The
Perpetration and Development of Orientalism by Oriental, explores the
working of reduced, essentialized and skewed representation in the
fictional work of Uzma Aslam Khan Trespassing and Typhoon by
Qaisera Shahraz. Both Huggans and Lau have contested against the
aggressive promotion of many Oriental writers by Occidental marketing
pundits. Both of them are of the opinion that the works that gain
recognition in international market and which have a high scope of
winning prizes of international acclaim are invariably those which
appease the Western thirst for the mysterious and elusive East. These
fictional works are usually two pronged. They not only present such
images which substantiate Western notion of East being unfathomable.
But they cleverly juxtaposed these, with other, more vilifying tropes of
East as necessarily backward, steeped in poverty, corruption,
conservatism, a natural antithesis of the liberated West. These are some
of the fixed images which are repeated with a consistency across the
border. Pakistani English fiction writers are also charged with
presentation of essentialized and monolithic picture of the country. The
present paper, making use of interpretive and explorative analysis, seeks
to investigate the workings of these exoticizing strategies in the selected
texts of Uzma Aslam Khan Trespassing and Qaisera Shahraz Typhoon