Conflict, Trauma, and Counter-Hegemonic Discourse in Pakistani War Literature: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Mohsin Hamid's Exit West through Fairclough's Three-Dimensional Model

Abstract

Conflict and its traumatic consequences are issues of world literature in the post-modern era but the discursive processes of constructing, naturalizing and contesting these processes in Pakistani anglophone fiction are also under examined in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). This study argues that Exit West (2017) by Mohsin Hamid is an intervention in the discursive production and naturalization of forced migration and wartime trauma in global political discourse, using the three-dimensional CDA framework of text, discursive practice, and social practice developed by Norman Fairclough. The study used a qualitative methodology. Using purposive sampling a total of 35 textual extracts is chosen. The study deals with the theme of war, vulnerability of the body, and the theme of grief at Fairclough's micro-level text dimension. At the meso-level discursive practice dimension, it keeps pertinent focus on the intertextuality, genre hybridity, magical realism and polyphonic global vignette structure of the novel to generate and propagate counter-discourses of human refugeeism. At the macro-level social practice dimension, it positions these strategies within the postcolonial Pakistani politics and neoliberal border regimes and Foucauldian biopolitical power formations. Through analysis this study shows that the novel is an act of affect normalization, an intentional attempt not to aestheticize violence, and the reader is made into a co-producer of ethical outrage. The subsequent discoveries reveal three discursive formations of xenophobic nativism, panoptic drone surveillance, gendered semiotic resistance and ecocritical trauma, which are seen to interweave across all three dimensions of Fairclough. The study also offers a replicable methodological model for literary CDA in realist postcolonial fiction.

Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, Fairclough Three-Dimensional Model, Exit West, War Trauma, Pakistani Literature, Forced Displacement, Postcolonial Discourse, Magical Realism, Refugee Narratives, Affect Normalization