Bryant, Scott

This chapter examines how  Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Nuruddin Farah’s Crossbones critique the extractive practices, cultural hegemony, and systemic inequalities that sustain Global South dependencies under the guise of globalization and the moral discourses of humanitarianism, human rights, and development. By considering the protagonists’ transnational movements and alignments, the chapter demonstrates how these narratives resist reductive humanitarian frameworks and destabilize binaries such as savior/victim and Global North/South. Situating the novels within global literary networks and expectations, this chapter shows how both texts oppose the popular ‚humanitarian fictions‘ that are complicit in circulating the stereotypes, tropes, and narrative forms that reinforce distance and otherness. Rather, the novels foreground networks of complicity and interdependence through the portrayal of structural inequalities, uneven applications of international law, debt predation, and resource depletion. Both novels ultimately offer insight into how global Anglophone literature can highlight and challenge neocolonial and hegemonic discourses and structures