Transcultural Narrative in Khalid Hosseini’s and the Mountains Echoed: A New Historicist Analysis

Abstract

Hosseini in his third novel And the Mountain Echoed endeavors to portray the social, political, and historical background of different cultures and highlights the core issues running parallel within the situation of Afghanistan, entangled in challenges of political instabilities, social unrest, insecurities due to foreign invasion, the rise of Taliban and the status of Afghanistan after 9/11. By keeping tabs on Afghan culture, this research has explored Hosseini’s paralleled narratives of other cultures such as Paris, America, and Greece. To generate a power discourse, these narrations construct an identity and authoritative stance by invoking the influential backgrounds and histories that cause these different ethnicities to revolve all around the world, a global movement towards the reevaluation of the old notions and concepts about the fixity of boundaries of nation-states. By observing the cultural taboos in different countries, Hosseini points out the distressing factors that weaken a culture by referring to the Afghan wars and a certain political agenda in counter countries. By highlighting these cultural taboos, different nations uphold a discourse of power against rival cultures. Through counter-cultural practices, cultural values and taboos are set forth to evaluate the nature and function of different cultures presented in the novel. His indecisive affinity with his own native place shows his monomaniacal focus on a transcultural outlook. This research combines the technique of textual analysis with a qualitative mode of study. Hosseini’s ambivalent approach towards divergent cultural narratives inclines towards advanced and innovative aspects of the new historicist theory by Greenblatt. His radical ideas about culture and history have been utilized in the present study to analyze the text. His idea of anecdote in new historicism exists between de-nationalization and re-nationalization, between de-territorialization and re-territorialization authenticates his view of culture as being a gigantic text which embraces small events that skirmish with each other in a way that exemplifies a text on the basis of which the author constructs a melodrama to back up non-fiction elements within fictional taste. To support the power factor in cultural analysis, Foucault’s notions about the power structure are employed within Greenblatt’s two-sided cultural concept. The complicated nature of culture has been traced by the analysis of historical incidents and dialogue by different characters having contradictory and complex nature as per the complicated procedure of cultural phenomenon.