Both men in the process of 'mimicking' the foreign culture lose their sense of belonging, identity, home and even freedom. Daru, on the other hand, remains mesmerised by the elite Americanised culture of Lahore, a metaphorical representation of the supposed superior American culture within Pakistan. Whereas Changez grows out of his fascination of the colonist, superiority and delusional sense of identity offered by its cosmopolitanism and returns to embrace his cultural origins in Pakistan. Bhabha's concept of mimickery has been used to analyse both, Daru and Changez's, ambiguous perusal of an identity which is overwhelmingly tainted by the neo-colonial impacts. The theoretical insights for this research have been drawn from postcolonial scholarship on identity, by theorists such as Homi, k, Bhaba and Ashcroft. With specific focus on the male characters of Mohsin Hamid's Moth Smoke and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, this paper seeks to re-address the concept of 'identity' within a neo-colonial perspective.
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