Social Stratification, Alienation and Identity in Mohsin Hamid’s Moth Smoke
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31305/rrijm.2024.v09.n09.021Keywords:
Social stratification, alienation, identity, neo-colonialism, symbolic capitalAbstract
Mohsin Hamid’s debut novel Moth Smoke (2000) portrays social stratification, alienation, and identity crisis in postcolonial urban Pakistan. The narrative follows Darashikoh Shezad, a middle-class banker whose fall into poverty, addiction, and social marginalization reflects broader tensions of systemic inequality and rigid class hierarchies. Drawing on Louis Althusser’s concept of the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of symbolic and cultural capital, and Frantz Fanon’s critique of neo-colonialism, Moth Smoke illustrates how post-independence power structures replicate colonial patterns of domination. It reveals the alienation of individuals caught between personal aspiration and social exclusion, exposing a fractured sense of identity within inherited systems of power. It offers a critical perspective on the enduring struggle for selfhood and belonging in postcolonial societies.
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This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).
