Nonwestern Cyborg Subjectivities and Global Cyberspaces: The Location of the Smartphone in Mohsin Hamid’s Fiction

This chapter critically analyses cultural location of mobile phone usage in selected Pakistani novels (The Reluctant FundamentalistHamidThe Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit WestHamidExit West) and its intersections with globalglobal Information and Communication TechnologyTechnology (ICT) networks. I intend to examine how nonwestern humans’ relationships, behaviours, and philosophies are reconfigured by these technologies. By incorporating postmodern theoretical frameworks such as Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘rhizome’, and Latour’s theorization of Actor-Network Theory (ANT), this analysis will unravel the entanglemententanglement of locallocal ICT cultures with global media flows. This section demonstrates that smartphones have transformed individual and collective ways of living in the Global South and establishes that mobile phones, along with their wireless and invisible technologies, have most profoundly affected human relationships, their psyche, and their overall behaviour. I explore the socio-political and psycho-biological agency of phone in the postcolonialpostcolonial world to explore its dual function as a tool of empowerment and an instrument of surveillance. I highlight the ways in which mobile phones change the society and cultureculture of the third world, the gendergender-specific cultures of mobile phone users, mobile phones’ agency in causing a transformation of the identity signifier of ‘human’, politics of phones, the cellular networks’ placement of human beings in global and local cultures, and mobile phones’ critical role in global and local politics.