Narrating the Fragmented Nation: Shame, Hybridity, and National Identity in Salman Rushdie’s Shame

Abstract

This article analyzes how Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame transforms shame from a private space into a public domain, where it becomes a collective discourse that reveals the instability of postcolonial national identity in Pakistan. While existing scholarship has emphasized the novel’s political satire, feminist concerns, and magic realist techniques, less attention has been paid to shame as a mediating force between individual experience and nation formation. Drawing on Homi K. Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity, ambivalence, and the Third Space, this article analyzes major characters and their shame as constitutive of national identity formation. The analysis, therefore, demonstrates that shame circulates through bodies, families, and institutions, and exposes contradictions between official narratives of national purity and lived realities of people. The article concludes that Rushdie presents Pakistan as a fragmented nation constituted through repression, mimicry, and hybrid identities.