“If that would remove the pitiless look from his eyes”: affective vectors in the short story “My Son the Fanatic”

Abstract

The short story “My Son the Fanatic” belongs to the collection Love in a Blue Time, published in 1997 by Hanif Kureishi. The writer was born in 1957, in London, and has been publishing novels, plays, screenplays and short stories since 1980. With a history of immigration in his own family, the subject of migratory flows and their impact on identity constructions plays an important role in his work, specially, in his first two novels: The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and The Black Album (1995), in which the main characters build their identities based on an in-between position of cultures. In the short story, dealt with in this article, this topic is tackled again, here with another focus, namely, the engagement of these social actors divided between cultures with fundamentalism. In this sense, this contribution aims to discuss the way this radical thought establishes itself, followed by an alteration of the affective household. Thus, this discussion, at first, tries to think how this displacement of affective investments occurs in the family context and goes on, in a second step, to reflect about its role in the infiltration of radical thoughts in the main character’s identity conception. The short story does not offer answers, but it shows the pivotal role of affects in this configuration.