Globalization, Silence and Strategic Ambivalence in Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire and Burnt Shadows: A Postcolonial Analysis

Abstract

This article explores the interrelatedness of themes in the context of globalization, silence, and strategic ambivalence in Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire (2017) and Burnt Shadows (2009) from a postcolonial perspective. It claims that globalization, as depicted by Shamsie, is a multi-faceted phenomenon which alters identities, memories and political orientations across national and cultural lines. Using postcolonial notions of hybridity, ambivalence, and subaltern representation, the work examines the ways in which her characters negotiate issues of displacement, trauma, and belonging within transnational spaces. Globalization and migration in Shamsie's fiction have been made the subjects of recent scholarship, which has focused on the hybrid subjectivity that emerges from this, defined by cultural plurality and multiple loyalties (Aurangzeb & Saeed, 2025).The article continues to delve into silence as an active negative strategy of resistance, memory, and emotional life. Narratives of unspoken histories and repressed memories in both novels generate alternative spaces for marginalised voices and challenge dominant political narratives. While Home Fire reveals the consequences of surveillance, exclusion and Islamophobia in post-9/11 Britain, Burnt Shadows explores the personal impact of trauma and its connection to wider histories of war, colonialism and global conflict. The analysis shows how characters can struggle against unequal structures of power through the power of silence and how they can keep other forms of agency aside from official discourse. Furthermore, the study argues that strategic ambivalence is a key central tool of storytelling that helps Shamsie to reject binary oppositions (such as East and West, victim and perpetrator, homeland and diaspora). She introduces morally and culturally ambiguous characters, creating a foregrounding of the instability of identity in the modernity of today's global context. The results in this study indicate that these three interrelated forces of globalization, silence, and ambivalence challenge the essential zing approach to nation and culture and to belonging. Finally, the article opens up new possibilities for postcolonial literary research by providing a comprehensive analysis of Shamsie's fiction and embedding personal accounts in broader frameworks of historical violence, migration and transnational power dynamics.