The Uncanny Trajectories of Human-Camera Entanglements in Uzma Aslam Khan’s Thinner Than Skin

This chapter argues that one of the most significant tropes to study the posthumanposthuman dimension of technology in contemporary Pakistani Anglophone fiction is the motif of the camera. I will draw upon the theorization of the Freudian notion of the “uncanny” and Susan SontagSontag’s insights into the role of photographyphotography in contemporary society to conduct a diffractive analysis of the intra-actionintra-action between the postcolonialpostcolonial/diasporic character of Nadir (the main protagonist of Uzma Aslam KhanUzma Aslam Khan’s novel Thinner than SkinKhanThinner Than Skin) and camera technology. The analysis will focus on how Nadir’s human and material-discursive subjectivitysubjectivity of the camera have been co-constituted to unpack the existing socio-political and psychological discourses while highlighting the ethico-onto-epistemologicalethico-onto-epistemological implications of camera-human enmeshment in the contemporary milieu. In this text, the camera becomes a biopolitical extension of the panoptic agency of the imperialimperial powers that simultaneously re-Orientalizes the underprivileged communities with its selective framing and provides voyeuristic pleasure by photographing the miserable state of the nonwestern locations. Khan’s text employs the aesthetics of the ‘uncanny’ to unravel the anxiety, paranoia, and unease that the technology of the camera arouses within the hearts of postcolonial diasporic subjects.