Risky business in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland

Introduction: Risk, speculation, terror

Published in 2007 and 2008 respectively — the years of the global economic crisis — Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland notably mediate their predominant preoccupation with 9/11 through astute portrayals of the risks associated with financial speculation and its associated threats and terrors. In doing so, I argue, these novels instantiate “global financial crises” and “the threat of global terror networks” that Ulrich Beck identifies as central “axes of conflict” in post-9/11 world risk society (Beck, 2002: 41; emphasis in original). Hamid and O’Neill’s respective investment in the agonized racial terrain of post-9/11 North America, I add, clears the way for a deeper investigation into what Beck calls the “uneven distribution” of risk and terror along racial lines, and between the global world system’s economic core and its peripheral margins (2002: 42).

By foregrounding risk as the conceptual hinge linking speculative forms of financial acquisition to apocalyptic forms of terror, I posit a developmental shift away from critical perspectives attempting either to frame The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Netherland as salutary de- or extraterritorial correctives (see Rothberg, 2009; Golimowska, 2013; Wasserman, 2014) to the post-9/11 novel’s presiding preoccupation with traumatic domesticity (Gray, 2008), or those intent on foregrounding their gendered and racial limitations (Anker, 2011). By contrast, my approach develops existing arguments attentive to Hamid and O’Neill’s interest in illuminating otherwise surreptitious linkages between finance capital and 9/11 (see Morey, 2011; Medevoi, 2011; Darda, 2014). Linking these approaches to Annie McClanahan’s recent inquiry into “finance novels” such as Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges, Adam Haslett’s Union Atlantic, and Martha McPhee’s Dear Money (McClanahan, 2017: 16), I argue that The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Netherland are novels similarly attuned to the presentation of “an entirely new relationship between economic and cultural form” (McClanahan, 2017: 4).

The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Netherland’s contribution to this relationship depends upon a willingness to regard Hamid and O’Neill’s respective preoccupations with anxieties about “global-terror networks” on the one hand, and “global financial crises” on the other (Beck, 2002: 41), as signifying “different dimensions of world risk society” (Beck, 2002: 39). My reading of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Netherland therefore draws together Beck’s definition of risk as “the anticipation of catastrophe” (Beck, 2006: 332; emphasis in original) and Gabe Mythen’s definition of risk as “the balance between acquisitive opportunities and potential dangers” (Mythen, 2014: 12). Connecting Mythen’s understanding of risk as a concept “firmly coupled to the economic world through forms of statistical calculation, stock market speculation and company acquisitions” (2014: 13) to Beck’s suggestion that risk structures itself around “systematic way[s] of dealing with hazards and insecurities” (1992: 20), I identify security and control as risk’s central feature. Risk, in other words, entrenches regimes of insurance, security, and control in response to the premeditated anticipation of apocalyptic threat to present and future-directed acquisitive potential.

Having said this, I wish to add that my application of risk to The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Netherland is indebted to Max Haiven’s acknowledgement of the metaphorical slipperiness accompanying attempts to transpose financial terminology to cultural fields. Like Haiven, and following Leigh Claire La Berge, I therefore understand risk as both “asset” and as “impairment” or hazard, “security as physicality and securitization as expansive commodification” (La Berge, 2016: 525), and speculation as both risky financial praxis and as a feature of narrative. By reframing The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Netherland as what I call here “speculative narratives”, I hope to suggest that the air of suspicion generated by Hamid and O’Neill’s protagonists amounts to more than an indication of unreliability. Changez, for instance, produces a narrative designed to forestall the conclusion that his reluctant fundamentalism may be associated with terroristic forms of violence. By contrast, Chuck weaves richly informative narrative webs in his attempt to secure Hans’s trust and in order to keep alive the potentially profitable prospects of his speculative financial pursuits. Though directed toward different ends, I suggest that the perpetuation of such speculative narratives betray Changez’s and Chuck’s mutual apprehension of the precarity of black and Asian bodies in a post-9/11 world. These narratives are symptoms, in other words, of how risk society’s “promise of security” ironically “contributes to an increase in risks” (Beck, 2006: 332) that is felt with particular intensity across racial lines and geopolitical and economic divides between the global north and south.

Beck’s association of risk with the curtailment of “civil liberties” and “an increasing readiness, even in the centers of democracy, to break with fundamental values and principles of humanity” (2006: 341) is poignantly illustrated by Changez and Chuck’s respective interpellation as untrustworthy and potentially violent subjects. My interest, however, lies with Changez and Chuck’s attempts to resist such interpellation and to negotiate the racial limitations of post-9/11 North America by weaving narratives strategically designed to even the odds that are set against them. To see this, it is necessary to note that Hamid’s Pakistan-born Changez Khan acts as a risk-assessment agent for the American-led, yet globally influential valuation firm, Underwood Samson. In this regard, he shares with O’Neill’s Dutch stockbroker and Wall Street “guru” (31), Hans Van Den Broek, an expert ability to quantify, insure against, and profit from risks associated with speculative financial futures. Less obviously, but no less significantly, Netherland’s Trinidadian venture capitalist-cum-gambler, Chuck Ramkissoon, undertakes speculative financial gambits for future gain.

Changez, Hans, and Chuck thus represent subjects that adhere to Emily Johansen’s account of how “the rise and expansion of neoliberal financialization has seen particularly economic risks as the route to the biggest possible gain for the biggest possible cross-section of global society” (Johansen, 2018: 5). Yet the eventuality of 9/11, along with its traumatic and, more pertinently for the purposes of this article, racial implications, complicates Johansen’s observation that a “discursive operation of neoliberal financialization” underpins “aspirations for a universal, cosmopolitan humanity” (2018: 5). It is worth noting, for instance, that Hans, in the post-9/11 world of O’Neill’s novel, remains capable of pursuing potentially lucrative forms of financial reproduction premised upon his ability to assess, evaluate, and, ultimately, attenuate the risks associated with speculative financial markets in ways that Changez and Chuck cannot. Finding their commitments to multicultural forms of American identity threatened with foreclosure, both Changez and Chuck are, in different ways, increasingly marked not only as untrustworthy, potentially threatening, un-American “others”, but also as potentially violent — if not entirely terroristic — and precarious subjects.

Changez, Hans, and Chuck’s varied attempts to anticipate, and to mitigate against, future risk thus betray risk’s tendency to produce regimes of security and securitization that ironically tend to engender further, more intense, and potentially unpredictable forms of risk. A similar irony is evident in how Changez, Hans, and Chuck’s respective attempts to secure or to insure themselves against the risks associated with financial speculation are intensified in the wake of 9/11. This intensification reveals their mutual susceptibility to, and paradoxical courtship of, the terrors associated with either global catastrophe or, less expansively, localized expressions of violence. An aura of racially-coded, potentially anti-American terrorist threat consequently marks Changez’s transition from a promising agent of financial risk to the eponymous “reluctant fundamentalist” of Hamid’s novel. Similarly, if on a different scale, O’Neill offers suggestive evidence that Chuck, who recognizes the financial promise of multicultural markets in spite of 9/11’s racially reductive aftermath, may be involved in extortionist forms of violence in his attempts to recoup debts associated with his own financially risky speculations. Hans’s allusion to Grubman and Blodget’s links to the Dot-com bubble and subsequent tech-market crash of 2001 (2008: 31), ¹ meanwhile, hints at his own proximity to financial hazards and foregrounds his potential implication in the more diffuse, though no less significant, terrors associated with what Rob Nixon calls “structural” and “slow” (Nixon, 2011: 10, 2) forms of violence.

These details suggest that The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Netherland offer respective representations of subjects who cleave to Johansen’s view of neoliberal financial risk and upwardly-mobile cosmopolitan aspiration. Yet they do so only to lay bare the deleterious implications and effects of cosmopolitanism’s failure in a post-9/11 world in which racialized regimes of securitization have emerged in response to threats as seemingly unrelated as terrorism and financial catastrophe. Hamid and O’Neill’s respective interests are therefore more closely aligned with Johansen’s account of “vernacular cosmopolitanism” which recognizes “cosmopolitan mobility’s connection to dangerous and precarious forms of life” (2018: 4). If The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Netherland’s respective preoccupation with race and nation indicates the failure of cosmopolitanism, in other words, they also indicate an attempt to rehabilitate the nation-state as a haven for vernacular cosmopolitanism’s increasingly precarious, and increasingly racialized, subjects.

In my view, then, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Netherland centralize the failures of neoliberalism’s promise of cosmopolitan security around the intensification of the American security state. This failure, as Paul Amar suggests, entails “the reconfiguration of political debates and claims around social justice, political participation, or resource distribution into technical assessments of danger, operations of enforcement, and targetings of risk populations” (2013: 17) in the immediate and continuing wake of 9/11. As I will show, however, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Netherland strive to rehabilitate nation-states beyond America’s domestic borders and international territories as security-havens for subjects rendered more intensively precarious in post-9/11 America and in the economically precarious post-2007/8 world more generally.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist: An ex-janissary’s gaze

The Reluctant Fundamentalist stages an encounter between the United States and its others by having the novel’s protagonist engage in a one-sided dialogue with “the American”, a nameless visitor to Lahore, Pakistan, who regards his surroundings with a mixture of orientalist fascination and suspicion. The novel’s narrator, Changez Khan, mediates his American interlocutor’s experience of foreignness while rehearsing the story of his own abortive attempt to assimilate into American culture. Changez, we learn, left Lahore for Princeton and, having graduated at the top of his class, is awarded an internship at Underwood Samson, a small but prestigious risk assessment firm. ²

Changez’s induction into Underwood Samson’s “meritocracy” (2007: 39) ³ is also an induction into a world of “cosmopolitan” potential (55; emphasis in original). Underwood Samson’s cosmopolitan ideals benefit multiracial figures such as Changez, but also the “non-white” (42) Wainwright, whose father hails from Barbados and who seems to “understand Urdu” (44). These ideals also inform Changez’s initiation of an affair with Erica, another member of Princeton’s Ivy club, during a vacation to the island of Rhodes in Greece sponsored by the firm. In addition to offering its members privileged access to global tours such as these, travel also serves a more commercial function for Underwood Samson. In his capacity as risk-assessment agent, Changez is obliged to conduct business trips to the Philippines and Chile where he informs “clients how much their businesses were worth […] with a precision that was uncanny” (5). As these details suggest, Hamid presents global travel as a metaphor linking cosmopolitan privilege to the fluid, global circuits of free-market capitalism. In this way, he anticipates Johansen’s understanding of risk as “the hinge between the neoliberal status quo (which understands market gains as the only measure of freedom and value) and the demands of responsibility (framed as deliberately cosmopolitan in its scope)” (2018: 3). It is therefore unsurprising that Changez finds that his “Pakistaniness was invisible, cloaked by [his] suit, by [his] expense account, and — most of all — by [his] companions” (82) when he is in the service of Underwood Samson. In order to function as an efficient and cosmopolitan agent of financial speculation and risk, he is required to subordinate his cultural and political responsibilities to Pakistan.

By conforming to Underwood Samson’s commitment to “systematic pragmatism” (41), moreover, Changez rarely pauses to consider the potentially ruinous implications of an unfavourable valuation: “Does it trouble you to make your living by disrupting the lives of others?”, wonders Juan-Bautista, the owner of a Valparaiso publishing house threatened with foreclosure following an assessment by Underwood Samson (171). “We just value”, Changez replies, “We do not decide whether to buy or sell, or indeed what happens to a company after we have valued it” (171). Yet Underwood Samson does more than “just value”. Rather, the firm lubricates the potentially ruinous redirection of capital on both national and global scales. This becomes especially apparent when Jim, Changez’s handler at Underwood Samson, attempts to forge a bond of sympathetic identification with Changez based upon their mutual ability to direct the global flows of capital to their advantage. “You’re blood”, Jim declares, “brought from some part of the body that the species doesn’t need anymore. The tailbone. Like me. We came from places that were wasting away” (110). In this way, as Leerom Medovoi explains, Jim draws a trenchant (if limited) analogy between Pakistan and “America’s rust belt, a place from which the blood of finance is flowing away as it seeks better returns” (Medovoi, 2011: 650–651). Medovoi’s analysis of Jim’s euphemistic analogy recognizes global capital’s potential to reduce entire nation-states and whole populations to either the withered, primitive, obsolete, and useless status of a body’s vestigial organs, or to consign entire sectors of the American nation-state to geographical wastelands. Yet Medovoi says less about how Jim’s analogy elides his racial and cultural difference from Changez, or its tendency to locate or to contain capital’s geographical wastelands within American borders. Jim’s appeal to metaphor and euphemism thus serves to gloss over the ways in which Underwood Samson’s risk-producing financial assessments are implicitly linked to the terrors associated with specifically racialized and globally dispersed forms of slow economic violence.

In my estimation, and by way of contrast, Changez’s retrospective narrative is designed to reveal the racial and national limits of his commitment to Underwood Samson’s economic and cosmopolitan promise, and to foreground capital’s production of global, rather than simply national, geographical wastelands. Though tacitly felt throughout his induction into Underwood Samson, Changez becomes increasingly alert to his racial othering in the immediate wake of 9/11. After witnessing the destruction of the Twin Towers on his hotel television in the Philippines, for example, he notices “looks of concern” from his fellow passengers, admits that he felt “aware of being under suspicion”, and is compelled to join the passport control queue for “foreigners” (85) upon his return to the United States. In this way, Changez’s experience recalls Inderpal Grewal’s description of the “new racism” (2003: 547) of post-9/11 America. Accordingly, he begins to recognise how, in post-9/11 America, the cosmopolitan access conferred upon him by Underwood Samson is increasingly reoriented “in relation to modern regulative and disciplinary institutions” designed to frame “the Middle eastern/Muslim as terrorist” (2003: 536, 545). Despite his susceptibility to post-9/11 America’s “new racism”, Changez chooses to ignore early rumours regarding violence meted out against Pakistanis across America, FBI raids on mosques, and the disappearance and possible detention of Muslim men (107–108). Changez assumes that such cases of abuse were “rare” (107) and reasons that they would likely not affect him “because such things invariably happened, in America as in all countries, to the hapless poor, not to Princeton graduates earning eighty thousand dollars a year” (107–108). In this way, “clad in [his armour] of denial” (108), Changez is “able to focus — with continuing and noteworthy success — on [his] job”. It is only after Juan Bautista’s remarks about janissaries — “Christian boys […] captured by the Ottomans and trained to be soldiers of the Muslim army [who] fought to erase their own civilizations” (172) — that Changez begins to reconsider his relationship to America. Struck by Juan-Bautista’s words, he concludes: “I was a modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine and was perhaps even colluding to ensure that my own country faced the threat of war” (173).

Given these details, it is tempting to suggest that the post-9/11 intensification of what Paul Amar has recently called “racializing securitization discourses” (Amar, 2013: 18) is what ultimately scuppers Changez’s accession to Underwood Samson’s — and America’s — presumably cosmopolitan domains. Yet Changez’s retrospective narrative suggests that his preoccupation with racial, ethnic, and national difference precedes the eventuality of 9/11. Changez’s observations about race, ethnicity, and nation should therefore be regarded as a counter-discourse designed to hedge national and cultural commitments as collateral against the ironies and inconsistencies of security discourses willing to “see ‘racial mixture’ as the source of security risk and cultural crisis even as they celebrate the erotic and cultural power of these mixings” (Amar, 2013: 18). For example, when he admits to being “bridle[d]” (63) by Erica’s father’s suggestion that Pakistan has “some serious problems with fundamentalism” (63), Changez is in fact reacting to his interpellation as an orientalized, potentially “fundamentalist” other in ways that anticipate the 9/11 Commission Report’s investigation into the term under headings like “The Foundation of the New Terrorism” (2004: 47–70). If, in this way, Changez’s retrospective narrative delineates the contours of racializing security discourses that precede 9/11, it also subjects such narratives to tacitly ironic criticism. For example, the reader knows that Changez also embodies the values of Underwood Samson, whose motto, “focus on the fundamentals” (63), undermines Erica’s father’s more reductive assumptions about fundamentalism’s presumably foreign provenance. By juxtaposing two seemingly opposed definitions of “fundamentalism”, moreover, Changez’s narrative implicitly shortens the gap between the presumably terroristic ends of religiously coded fundamentalism and the potentially damaging speculative practices of Underwood Samson’s “single-minded commitment to financial detail” (112).

Changez’s recognition of the racially and nationally inscribed limits of Underwood Samson’s promise of a presumably cosmopolitan future recurs beyond America’s borders. In Manila, for example, he encounters “the driver of a jeepney” whose “undisguised hostility” is directed at Changez’s role as an Underwood Samson representative. Noting that “glaring is something we men of Lahore take seriously”, Changez “stare[s] back, getting angry” with himself for doing so (76). Changez thus participates in a form of chauvinistic jingoism designed to stake his claim to “glaring”, here understood as the sole-preserve of Pakistani rather than Filipino national pride. Yet he soon qualifies this initial reaction with his subsequent observation that an American colleague immersed “in the minutiae of our work” seemed suddenly “foreign” (77; emphasis in original), and he admits that he “felt in that moment much closer to the Filipino driver than to [the American]” (77). In this way, again, Changez’s retrospective narrative manages to revise superficial assumptions about racially or nationally inscribed forms of difference while highlighting the hollowness of Underwood Samson’s promise of a cosmopolitan future. More crucially, Changez’s narrative asserts an affective bond between Manila and Pakistan (and, later, Chile) premised upon their mutual position as nation-states similarly subject to risks attending American-led forms of speculative global finance. Changez thus hopes to forge a degree of solidarity between nations located in the global south, and to direct their mutual interests against American-led regimes of financial securitization threatening the productive power of their labour-force.

Changez’s dawning awareness of his own tacit commitment to vernacular expressions of cosmopolitan solidarity intensifies after his brief return to Lahore. Shocked by the apparent state of disrepair of his home in the Punjabi city and his brother’s assessment of the steady militarization of Pakistan’s domestic sphere in the aftermath of 9/11 (143), he initially believes that he is experiencing the steady decline of Pakistan into a state of ruin. Yet he also suspects that his impressions of Pakistan have been distorted by American indoctrination: “I was looking about me with the eyes of a foreigner” — a foreigner that he proceeds to link to a “particular type of unsympathetic American” (141). By contrast, when he resolves to “look about […] with an ex-janissary’s gaze — with […] the analytical eyes of a product of Princeton and Underwood Samson, but unconstrained by the academic’s and the professional’s various compulsions” (178), Changez believes that he is able to see more clearly America’s role as an essentially imperial and martially inclined security state. For Changez, America’s “empire” is sadly “traditional”, conforming to an imperial and ultimately carceral social structure in which “armed sentries” man checkposts at which members of a “suspect race” are “quarantined and subjected to […] inspection” (178).

Intriguingly, Changez proceeds to associate securitization with a financial order that itself produces and relies upon a “serf class lacking the requisite permissions to abide legally and forced to accept work at lower pay” (178). By describing himself as an “indentured servant whose right to remain was dependent upon the continued benevolence of [his] employer” (178), he recognizes how the attempt to securitize specifically American interests against risks associated with its continued pursuit of speculative forms of finance capital demands the production of a global precariat consigned to the terror of “slow violence”. For Changez, America’s imperial romance is driven by the pursuit of global capital which itself depends upon the production of a global precariat and the entrenchment of martial forms of violence, securitization, and control.

Changez’s growing antipathy towards America and his recommitment to Pakistan is symbolically and somatically reinforced by his decision to grow his beard. As he explains, the beard is simultaneously “a form of protest”, “a symbol of [...] identity”, and an attempt to remind himself of “the reality [he] had just left behind” (148). The beard thus forms part of a larger symbolic order that also informs Changez’s celebratory mediation, for his American interlocutor, of Pakistani cuisine such as “Kashmiri tea” and “jalebis” (6), its “urban” modernity (36; emphasis in original), cultural values regarding women (25) and beggars (45), evocative descriptions of its weather (35), its unique “flying foxes” (71), the deep cultural significance of “jasmine” (88–89), and pride in architectural monuments such as the Royal Mosque, the Shalimar Gardens, and the Lahore Fort (116).

Read in conjunction with the reductive ethnology undergirding the new racism of post-9/11 America, however, the beard emerges as a somatically charged example of his attempt to display his confrontational difference from Underwood Samson’s cosmopolitan “army of clean-shaven […] co-workers” (148). In this way, the beard acts as a more troubling metonym for the otherwise occluded proximity between financial and martial forms of terror. It also signals a combative inversion of Grewal’s observation that “hyphenated” (2003: 538) or multicultural Americans protected themselves against post-9/11 America’s new racism by signalling “their allegiance to ‘America’ and being ‘American’ by the same logic of visibility that marked them as racially un-American, in order to avoid becoming victims of racist violence” (2003: 548). The beard, in other words, does not simply mark the re-alignment of Changez’s sympathies with a Pakistani heritage that seems impoverished when compared to America’s cosmopolitan and economic promise. Rather, it is a symbol of resistant otherness directed against his suspicion that American led-forms of global finance cannot but impoverish nation-states such as Pakistan, the Philippines, and Chile, and signalling his potentially martial commitment alongside these entities against American globalization. Changez’s experiences in Manila, Valparaiso, and Lahore thus foreground the precarity of nation-states in the global south as much as they gesture to the nation-state as a space in which racial, cultural, and ethnic differences may be securely housed in an increasingly racially risky post-9/11 world.

Changez’s account of the dispiriting implications of a system of global finance based on speculation and security and linked to terror is compelling enough to initiate his withdrawal from all aspects of his American life. He is increasingly distanced from Erica, who falls ill and is institutionalized before “vanishing” (187), refuses to work (174), and loses his job and his visa before leaving the United States (174, 179). As a lecturer at a university in Lahore, he recommends economic disengagement from America, while imagining that his popularity among students depends on their ability to recognize “the practical value of [his] ex-janissary’s skills, which [he] imparted to them in [his] courses on finance” (203). Changez nevertheless suspects that “the merits of participating in demonstrations for greater independence in Pakistan’s domestic and international affairs” (203) may put him at risk. He finds himself latched upon by a “foreign press” eager to label such demonstrations “anti-American” (203) or, less euphemistically, to mark them as potentially terroristic threats that may well call for violent retaliation.

Thus interpolated into what Ariane de Waal calls “the ideology of security”, Changez exemplifies a paranoid subject who responds to risk society “with a fundamental distrust” (De Waal, 2018: 100). Yet paranoia, understood as a mere symptom of security ideology, struggles to account for agency that informs the equivocal, ambiguous, and dissembling nature of Changez’s narrative operations. This narrative, shrewdly interspersed with irony, ambiguity, and wry wit, hedges Changez’s confident ratiocination about market speculation and its links to risk and terror, and troubles simplistic accounts of his narrative’s unreliability. In my view, Changez’s narrative produces uncertainty about his motives in order to resist his reductive interpellation, in a post-9/11 world, as an untrustworthy and potentially terroristic subject. Changez’s narrative, in other words, is designed to keep his interlocutor guessing — to keep ambiguity (or speculation) in play as a means by which to cast doubt over any attempt to definitively mark him as a threat to American hegemony and, in this way, to pre-empt and undermine his subjection to potentially violent retribution.

To see this, it is necessary to acknowledge Changez’s willingness to entertain the possibility that his actions as a teacher may well be construed as a form of anti-American terrorism, and to take seriously his passing suggestions that his American interlocutor may not be a tourist but an undercover CIA assassin. ⁴ Changez persistently raises, before retracting, such possibilities: his scar is either the result of his time in a “training camp” (53) or the result of an accidental burn during childhood; his American-interlocutor’s “unusual telephone” (34) might be used for the purpose espionage or it may simply be a convenient tool for tourists. Changez’s revisions are designed to invoke, in order to defuse, his own anxious speculations but they may also be regarded as narrative strategies designed to either provoke or to pre-empt a response climactic enough to exorcise the air of suspicion and paranoia that charges their exchange. The disturbing implications of this latter possibility informs Changez’s troubling suggestion that a “bulge manifesting itself through the lightweight fabric” of the American’s suit may in fact be an undercover agent’s “sidearm” (158). Despite reassuring himself that the bulge is only a travel wallet (158), the presiding aura of danger and imminent violence of this scene returns to inform the novels’ concluding lines: “I detect a glint of metal”, Changez observes as he prepares for a farewell handshake with the American, adding that since “you and I are bound by a certain shared intimacy, I trust it is from the holder of your business cards” (209). Given the novel’s tacit exploration of the links between global commerce and terror, it is clear that it makes very little difference whether the American is reaching for a gun or a business card. In either case, as Changez’s disquisition on how American-led, globally expansive financial interventions produces the “slow violence” of economic precarity felt most intensely in local spaces well beyond America’s desmene, the risks associated with either outcome will remain similarly, catastrophically, hazardous.

Netherland: Gurus and gamblers

If Changez initially represents one example of risk society’s cosmopolitan “expert-class” (Houser, 2010: 128 135), Netherland’s Hans Van Den Broek, an equities analyst of “large-cap oil and gas stocks” for “M—, a merchant bank with an enormous brokerage operation” (31), represents another. Hans, however, is less susceptible to the racial conditions complicating Changez’s attempts to negotiate post-the event America. Despite “stock-tipping” scandals that have contributed to the “mildly infamous” nature of “the analyst business” (32) in which he works, he sustains his reputation as a well-respected “guru” within the realm of financial speculation. He also prides himself that Institutional Investor has ranked him “number four in his sector” (32). In spite of 9/11’s deleterious effect on his personal and professional life — the shock of the event spurs Hans’s separation from his wife, Rachel — Hans is able to return to his role as an agent of financial risk assessment after successfully working through the trauma occasioned by it.

Given the domesticated limitations of the post-9/11 novel, it is worth noting that Hans’s engagement with racial difference via his participation in games of cricket conducted by New York’s marginal, immigrant communities has been read as a salutary response to the 9/11 preoccupation with traumatic domesticity (see Rothberg, 2009; Hartnell, 2011; Golimowska, 2013; and Wasserman, 2014). For Elizabeth Anker, by contrast, cricket, like Hans’s promiscuous sexual escapades, merely represents another form of “narcotic diversion” (Anker, 2011: 473) providing a backdrop for his rehabilitation. From Anker’s vantage point, then, Netherland re-entrenches the 9/11 novel’s more general encoding of “white, heteronormative, patrician masculinity” (2011: 468) and, like the post-9/11 novel more generally, thus “covers over fissures in the public sphere, stifles indeterminacy, and [suppresses] what might otherwise be insurrectionary dissensus” (2011: 469). As I wish to suggest by way of contrast, the “complexity […] of multiple traumas” that Anker calls for may be brought into clearer view by shifting attention away from the terms of traumatic domesticity conventionally applied to the 9/11 novel, and towards another more cognizant of O’Neill’s preoccupation with the linkages between financial speculation, risk, and terror.

Consider, for example, Hans and Rachel’s displacement from the security of their home in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and their subsequent sojourn in the derelict environment of the Chelsea Hotel, where “a goods truck smashing into a pothole sounded like an explosion” or when “the howl of a passing motorbike caused Rachel to vomit with terror” (22–23). Rachel’s reaction here attests to a form of nachträglichkeit — a delayed reaction to the traumatic experience of 9/11. Yet Rachel’s visceral response to quotidian details may also be understood via Fredric Jameson’s remarks about how the “transformation of social relations and political institutions” under the sign of late capitalism — which I here associate with the mystifying circuits of terror networks flourishing under the sign of world-risk society — “is projected onto the vision of place and landscape, including the human body” (Jameson, 1991: 59). O’Neill’s portrayal of the Chelsea Hotel, so bewildering and unsettling to Hans and Rachel, thus emerges as an apt “representational shorthand” (Jameson 1991: 38) for the mystifying circuits of a vast, potentially incomprehensible, yet anxiety-inducing world-system of which risk and terror are increasingly more central features.

Jamesonian allegory also illuminates O’Neill’s treatment of racialized bodies as sites upon which the diffuse, difficult to apprehend, and uneven distribution of violence instantiated by speculative finance capital are rendered visible. From this perspective, and far from Anker’s suggestion that Netherland “depicts US race relations and immigration policy as […] a testament to the mythology of America as an ethnic melting pot” (2011: 468), O’Neill’s understanding of the uneven distribution of risk and hazard across racial or multicultural spaces, beyond the security of domestic domains, is more readily apparent. It is worth noting, for example, that one of Hans’s first games of cricket is interrupted by an argument that swiftly threatens to spiral into gun violence (14–15).

More generally, as I will presently demonstrate, the lives that Hans encounters beyond the domestic sphere — whether in the Chelsea Hotel, multicultural eateries introduced to him by Vinay, or via his tours with Chuck Ramkissoon of the city’s margins — present multicultural spaces and individuals (such as the Chelsea Hotel’s seemingly suicidal Taspinar) as particularly susceptible to precarity, abjection, and hazardous forms of risk. Risk’s transmutation from “asset” to “impairment” (La Berge, 2016: 525) is especially apparent in these spaces, emerging as the visceral counterpoint to fields of security marked by the home and, more pertinently, by Hans’s expertise in the realm of financial risk assessments and speculative analyses of financial markets. Put differently, it is outside the domain of the market (where financial risks may be safely speculated upon, premediated, and securely managed) that Hans and his family are exposed to hazard. Moreover, it is in this zone of hazard that Hans encounters multicultural figures living risky lives in the abject margins of the American and global market. What I wish to consider, then, is whether the logic of risk society applies equally to the multicultural figures (such as Vinay and Chuck) who come to inhabit Hans’s recuperative milieu and who represent very different forms of analytical expertise and global mobility. If Vinay and Chuck occupy positions beyond domesticated fields of financial speculation and risk, and if their lives are subsequently more prone to hazard, both nevertheless perpetuate narratives designed, on the one hand, to foster trustworthiness and to lubricate their ability to move fluidly through arenas of cosmopolitan and financial profitability. On the other hand, however, these narratives remain fanciful enough to mark Vinay and Chuck as suspicious and potentially hazardous agents of risk and speculation.

Vinay, for example, makes his living writing magazine columns for New York restaurants. Yet if these reports exude “bright certainty and expertise” (65), Hans soon begins to “understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which [Vinay] contended, […] the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which the dishes of New York emerge” (65). Hans’s “suspicion that [Vinay’s] work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and […] circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding the endless perplexity of the world” (65) informs his subsequent analogy between Vinay’s culinary speculations and his own expertise as a trader in stocks: “I felt like Vinay”, he admits, “cooking up myths from scraps and peels of fact” (68). Hans’s analogy inadvertently suggests that financial speculation, like Vinay’s culinary reviews, depends upon the circulation of misconceptions, perplexity, and myth rather than facts. More troublingly, the analogy is also designed to forge a degree of cosmopolitan sympathy premised upon the assumption that Hans and Vinay share similar affective experiences despite their racial and economic differences. Hans thus secures the mistaken belief that his ability to move money fluidly through financial space also guarantees his ability to move freely through, and to access, multicultural or cosmopolitan forms of community. At the same time, the analogy elides the very different intensities and scales of hazard attending Hans and Vinay’s respective contexts. The globally expansive nature of the financial catastrophe associated Hans’s firm, in other words, are diminished by virtue of their being partially (and falsely) equated with or displaced onto Vinay’s precarious vocation.

Hans’s willingness to draw such expedient analogies across racial and economic divides is similarly evident, but also trenchantly undermined, by his friendship with Chuck Ramkissoon. Chuck’s broad (if anecdotal) knowledge mirrors the seductive patina of expertise that informs Vinay’s “bright certainty” and Hans’s “guru”-like command over perplexing financial markets. Hans is mesmerized by Chuck’s ability to “fascinate” (93) him with “whatever was on his mind: cricket, American history, birding, sales of Brooklyn real estate, meteorological phenomena, interesting economic data, resonant business stories […], and eye-catching miscellanea such as the business of the electrical inferno” (133). Like Vinay’s myths (68), and like Hans’s similarly “mythic” (31) reputation, Chuck’s anecdotes are also (and revealingly, given my interest in the links between speculation, finance, and terror), a form of “minting” (79). However, rather than adding to the world’s perplexity, they are designed to consolidate his expertise, moral rectitude, and trustworthiness — albeit with a view to exploiting Hans’ss financial acumen for his own speculative ventures. Complemented by guided tours around New York, Chuck’s narratives foreground for Hans the cosmopolitan aspects of America’s immigrant past as a means of consolidating a fetishized ideal of contemporary American inclusivity. In doing so, Chuck simultaneously means to strengthen his friendship with Hans, to underscore his belonging as an immigrant in multicultural America, and, via a vainglorious plan to capitalize on the rights to televise American cricket across the globe, to justify a more dubious pursuit of an American Dream wedded to financial gain.

As Hans learns, Chuck intends to establish “New York Cricket Club”, and to convert Floyd Bennett Field into a cricketing arena that, he wagers, will host twelve “exhibition matches every summer, watched by eight-thousand spectators at fifty dollars a pop” (103). That Chuck hopes to draw this audience from New York’s cricket-loving immigrant community — “[t]he Indian […] population […] Bangladeshis […] South Asians […] kids from Pakistan” (102–103) — once again foregrounds the linkages between capital and idealized notions of cosmopolitanism. Chuck’s presumably altruistic investment in America’s marginalized, multicultural communities, in other words, complements his speculative interest in the financial possibilities afforded by the expansion of his venture into a media enterprise of global proportions. Recognizing cricket’s potential to attract potentially lucrative “advertising” deals, Chuck also hopes to extract financial reward from a clubhouse catering to “two thousand members at one thousand dollars a year plus initiation fee” (103). More expansively, he hopes to secure “TV rights” capable of accessing “a viewership of seventy million in India alone”, and sponsorship deals with “Coca-Cola [and] Nike”, multinational companies that are “desperate to get at the South Asian market” (104). In this way, Chuck betrays the ease with which financial speculation commodifies cosmopolitan multiculturalism.

It soon becomes clear, however, that the potential profitability of Chuck’s speculative financial aspirations depends upon a concomitant courtship of risk premised upon occluded forms of hazard and violence:

If I tell them I’m going to build a playground for minorities, they’re going to blow me away. But if I tell them we’re starting something big, tell them we’re bringing back an ancient national sport, with new leagues new leagues, new franchises, new horizons […]. That’s why I’m ready to do what it takes to make this happen. (280)

Chuck’s allusion to “minorities” betrays his bitter awareness of a racial bias that stacks the odds against him in ways that, he implies, may require more ruthless attempts to secure his interests. Indeed, Hans is given a disturbing glimpse of the lengths to which Chuck is willing to go to secure his investments (280). Explaining that he is “running late” and needs to attend to a “business matter”, Chuck drives Hans to Williamsburg and enters a building “with a signboard proclaiming the presence of the FOCUS LANGUAGE SCHOOL” (281–282). Hans presently witnesses the arrival of Mike Abelsky, Chuck’s Russian business partner who, Hans notices, is carrying a baseball bat (283). Entering the building a few minutes later, Hans encounters a scene that appears to confirm Chuck’s involvement in extortion:

The office, a windowless box, was more or less destroyed. A filing cabinet had been upended and its contents were strewn everywhere. A framed map of the United States lay on the floor, its glass in pieces. Somebody had smashed a potted plant against the photocopying machine. [...] [A] man in his thirties came in. He had splashed water on his face, but there were traces of soil around his ears and in his hair, which was of the pale, almost colourless, Russian variety. His blue shirt was filthy. […] The baseball bat was resting against the wall. It was stained with dirt. (283–284)

Though never quite confirmed, this incident, along with Chuck’s association with Abelsky — a figure whose sinister air of criminal mystery recalls The Great Gatsby’s Meyer Wolfsheim — consolidates the impression that he has links to organized crime, and hints at his apparent readiness to extract financial debt by violent means.

More allusively, however, the break-in sheds further light on Chuck’s management of weh-weh: a Trinidadian betting game that, by exploiting the financial potential of the multicultural communities living risky lives in America’s margins, presumably serves to fund his speculative financial endeavours. O’Neill’s broader treatment of the linkages between Hans’s role as a financial analyst well aware of his firm’s part in illegal fiscal practices and Chuck’s involvement in illegal gambling via weh-weh is subtle enough to be completely overlooked. Nevertheless, that Hans shakes his head when Chuck asks him if he is “a gambling man” (222) suggestively attests to O’Neill’s interest in drawing a link between two very different scales of risk, speculation, and terror: the globally catastrophic consequences of financial crises and the financially ruinous implications of gambling. From this perspective, Chuck’s question hints at an analogy between high finance and gambling that, were Hans to accept it, would threaten to render him liable, via tangential analogical association, for globally dispersed versions of the extortionist violence he later accuses Chuck of meting out. Given his earlier allusions to Grubman, who misled investors by issuing research reports that concealed certain financial and material facts, or Blodget, who offered assessments about stocks that conflicted with published reports, Hans’s attempt to negate this analogy is a particularly unconvincing attempt to avoid culpability.

It is tempting to read Hans’s denial against the scholarly backdrop of John and Jean Comaroff’s suggestion that gambling may well be seen as a debased analogy for the routinization of “a widespread infatuation with, and popular participation in, high-risk dealings in stocks, bonds, and funds whose fortunes are governed largely by chance” (2000: 296). Yet, unlike the analogy he forges with Vinay, Hans here attempts to distance himself from Chuck’s involvement in gambling by tacitly reaffirming his earlier assertion that he is “a rationalist” (31) rather than an agent of fortune. In this way, he sidesteps the implication that financial speculation is similarly susceptible to extortion or, differently stated, the violent extraction of capital that characterizes “slow violence”. Instead, given Jameson’s claims about the difficulties of apprehending the “impossible totality” of the late capitalist world-system and the types of aesthetic displacement produced under the sign of late capital, the structural violence of global finance capital is allegorically displaced onto, and embodied by, Chuck. In this way, Chuck’s role as “weh-weh man” bears an uncanny resemblance to the similarly occulted economies of Wall Street and the white-collar crime bedevilling Hans’s firm. That Chuck’s idealistic investment in an American Dream premised upon myths of cosmopolitanism and market monopolization culminates in violence thus exposes the occluded, extractive, violence upon which speculative forms of finance capital is premised.

Risky returns to the national

Chuck’s Mafioso-like expression of targeted violence on the one hand, and Changez’s call for nationalist resistance to American imperialism on the other, are both construed — by Hans and by the nameless American agent respectively — as potential acts of terror or violence. Yet both responses depend upon an attempt to hedge the nation against the dispersal of financial risk’s cataclysmic consequences across marginal spaces located within the global south. From this perspective, Changez’s framing of Pakistan as a national haven represents an acknowledgement of his susceptibility to, and an attempt to secure himself against, forms of precarity produced under the sign of American-led forms of speculative finance.

While it may seem difficult to reconcile this understanding of Changez’s return to the nation with Chuck’s continued courtship of speculative financial gambits, it is worth noting that Chuck responds to Hans’s shock at his violent actions by undertaking a similarly symbolic narrative return to a national home located in the global south. When Hans demands that Chuck apologize for his actions, Chuck instead tells Hans a story about an encounter in Trinidad with a drug cartel during a youthful expedition to the Maracas waterfall in an attempt to capture “one of the most wonderful songbirds of Trinidad, the violaceous euphonia, known to everybody on the island as the semp” (321–322). Following “a small dirt track, going into the forest, clumsily covered by branches”, Chuck arrives at “a tree” where he finds “rakes, hoes, fertilizer, a cutlass” and marijuana “seedlings in a cup” (323). When he hears “voices coming up the trail”, Chuck immediately realizes that “these were marijuana growers” and that the “two black men, one with long dreadlocks, the other an East Indian with sunglasses covering his eyes […] the kind that Aristotle Onassis used to wear […] wouldn’t hesitate to chop me” (323–324).

Chuck’s admission that “those sunglasses were terrifying” suggests precisely the type of visceral, sensory embodiment of the globally dispersed, and therefore mystifying and hushed-up, circuits of late capital that, as Jameson argues, are otherwise impossible to apprehend. They are, in other words, figurative emblems metonymically recalling Onassis’s marriage to Jackie Kennedy (a detail that surreptitiously consolidates finance capital’s linkages to a political dynasty with a mythic position in American history) and linked to conspiracy theories that Onassis had a hand in the assassination of Robert Kennedy. In this way, Chuck’s passing comparison of the marijuana grower with the wealthy Greek shipping magnate and oil tycoon implicitly locates hazardous risk and paranoid speculation at the intersection between finance capital and terror.

Chuck’s description of his getaway is attuned to similarly uncanny linkages between risk, terror, and financial speculation. Complementing his description of the dangers of the terrain through which he makes his escape is his admission that the experience also invested him with “a strong sense of luck […] luck, good and bad, everywhere” (326). For Chuck, it is “luck” — a form of providential thinking related to “fortune” but also, given its obsolete, Dutch etymology, to “gain, profit, financial advantage” (OED) — that undergirds financial speculation’s association with hazardous forms of risk and, as Anna Tsing suggests, optimistic forms of “conjuring” (2001: 159). Yet Chuck’s speculative conjuring of similarly optimistic possibilities also elides any distinction between risk’s acquisitive and hazardous potentialities: rather, “luck” is inextricably wedded to his very survival. Consequently, when confronted by a stream that “dropped twenty feet into a pool”, it is “luck” that compels him to risk leaping “into water that may or may not be deep” and which enables his eventual passage to safety (325–326).

For Hans, Chuck’s story suggests that dangers or hazards experienced in the global south are framed as a form of credit capable of accounting for or settling future debts. Yet if Chuck hopes that his story might account for his actions, Hans is unwilling to accept that it stands as an adequate “explanation” (329):

I wasn’t interested in drawing a line from his childhood to the sense of authorization that permitted him, as an American, to do what I had seen him do. He was expecting me to make the moral adjustment — and here was the adjustment I really couldn’t make. (329)

Far from representing a gesture toward reconciliation, then, Chuck’s story has the inverse effect. Yet it is worth noticing that Hans’s condemnation depends upon his willingness to think of Chuck as “an American” rather than as Trinidadian. Quite unlike Hans and Rachel (or Underwood Samson’s multicultural horde of young, globetrotting, risk-assessment specialists), Chuck’s global mobility — like Changez Khan’s — is occasioned by forms of social precarity thriving at the margins of, and produced by, risk society’s displacement of economies of terror across the Brandt-Line’s socio-economic divide. To regard Chuck’s story as a marker of Trinidadian experience thus demands greater acknowledgement of his susceptibility to the darker operations of global finance and terror in the global south.

Readers also need to acknowledge his willingness to hedge such experiences as collateral against presumably unethical and potentially violent attempts to secure himself against risk.

Chuck’s conception of survivability wedded to speculative finance represents a form of resilience that, following Brad Evans and Julian Reid, reduces his life to “a bare and endangered existence” (2014: 13), binding his humanity into a “community based on its own endangerment” (2014: 4). It is illuminating, therefore, that Chuck’s wife, Anne, dismisses his desire to be cremated in Brooklyn and insists that his body be returned to Trinidad for burial (313–314). In doing so, Anne hopes to undo the cycle of risk, speculation, and terror structuring Chuck’s — and America’s — economic and cosmopolitan desire. Chuck’s return to Trinidad thus mirrors Changez’s return to Pakistan. Taken together, these homecomings tacitly reassert the worth of the nation-state as a safe haven for subjects marginalized and exposed to hazard in a world increasingly and unevenly securitized against terroristic and economic risk.

Conclusion

As Pakistani- and Trinidadian-Americans, Changez and Chuck respectively represent the post-9/11 plight of what Grewal calls multicultural America’s “hyphenated subject” (2003: 538). In a post-9/11 world, in other words, Changez and Chuck’s attempts to access spaces of cosmopolitan or multicultural heterogeneity gradually gives way to more reductively singular forms of nationally inscribed identity. For Grewal, 9/11 marks a clear shift from hyphenated to singular forms of specifically American identity (2003: 548). As Hamid and O’Neill suggest, however, there is no reason why such singular identities should naturally coalesce around the signifier “American” rather than “Pakistani” or “Trinidadian”. As I have shown, Hamid and O’Neill posit racial agony as the means by which symbolic returns to national homelands are either necessitated by precarity or called upon to justify otherwise irresponsible or questionable forms of action.

Hamid and O’Neill’s treatment of Changez and Chuck’s hyphenated subjectivities nevertheless resonate with Grewal’s insights in complex ways. On the one hand, as Hamid suggests, a multicultural or hyphenated identity is one of the privileges Changez is willing to sacrifice in order to reconnect with Pakistan as a means by which to secure himself against racialized and economic forms of risk. Chuck, by contrast, hews to a multicultural ideal in ways that resonate more clearly with Grewal’s observation that multiculturalism invokes self-regulatory practices via “the possibility of ‘improvement’ through consumer culture” so as to secure an American identity figured as a form of “consumer citizenship” (2003: 539, 542). Yet given Chuck’s potential for violence, his self-improving multiculturalism must be read against Grewal’s further observation that the similarly “transnational figure of the ‘terrorist’ […] is beyond redemption [...] [and] is of such a high risk to the nation and the state as to be incarcerated immediately or to be destroyed” (2003: 539). From this perspective, Chuck’s hyphenated identity occupies one end of a spectrum of transnational and multicultural identity and identification, while the figure of the terrorist occupies the other. In other words, Chuck’s strategic occupation of identity on either side of the hyphen, along with his willing participation in global markets of financial speculation, mark him as a figure of self-improvement rather than a person who may involve himself in terrorism. It now becomes possible to suggest that Chuck’s hyphenated identity as a Trinidadian-American, and his narrative celebration of multicultural cosmopolitanism, are strategically wielded. These aspects of his personality act as insurances against dangers and risks grounded in either suspicion of the multicultural citizen and hyphenated subject, or outright racial and ethnic prejudice against such identities.

In certain ways, too, Changez and Chuck both recall Engin Isin’s conceptualization of the “neurotic citizen”. This citizen, unlike risk society’s rational calculating subject, is rather “governed by anxiety and insecurity while striving to attain absolute security” (Isin, 2004: 232). Chuck’s production of narratives designed to secure Hans’s confidence in speculative financial schemes thus accords with Ariane De Waal’s description of “the neurotic citizen [who] actively and optimistically cooperates in the neoliberal project” (2018: 100). Yet following De Waal’s interest in distinguishing paranoid from neurotic subjects, it seems feasible that Changez and Chuck occupy different ends of risk society’s affective spectrum. Changez’s narrative, unlike Chuck’s, is marked by a seemingly paranoid suspicion rather than neoliberal neurosis. Despite these differences, however, Changez and Chuck share an interest in imagining and narrating speculative future scenarios for the purpose of securing themselves against risk. Changez’s reflection on his own precarious political position in a post-9/11 world is a trenchant indication of the affective pressures faced by racial others attempting to live under the sign of world risk:

I was warned by my comrades that America might react to my admittedly intemperate remarks by sending an emissary to intimidate me or worse. Since then, I have felt rather like Kurtz waiting for his Marlowe. I have endeavoured to live normally, as though nothing has changed, but I have been plagued by paranoia, by an intermittent sense that I am being observed. I have even tried to vary my routines — the times I left for work, for example, and the streets I took — but I have come to realize that all this serves no purpose. I must meet my fate when it confronts me, and in the meantime I must conduct myself without panic. (208)

Changez’s paranoid suspicion that he has been placed under surveillance, and that he faces an uncertain, potentially life-threatening future, belies his attempt to reaffirm his self-composure and archness by refusing to perpetuate risk society’s production of uncertainty and speculation. At the same time, like Chuck and, to a lesser extent, Hans, he remains strategically cognizant of the potential of “floating” dissembling or equivocal narratives as insurances against potentially catastrophic, future risk.