National Narrative and America: Political World Making in Benazir Bhutto’s Daughter of the East

Abstract

This paper uses contextualist-rhetorical narratology, developed by Wayne-Booth and Phelan, to explore narrative techniques in Benazir Bhutto’s autobiography, “Daughter of the East”. It bases its thesis on the premise that political narratives often focus on the way the world exists and relate the identity formation of the narrator to the political forces that control the affairs of the world. Therefore, personal narratives of political leaders can be used to shed light on their views of these forces, and the way they tend to side by them or oppose them. This paper studies Benazir Bhutto’s view of the forces of American hegemony on world affairs vis-à-vis her own national narrative during the troubled days of General Zia’s martial law, and her struggle to bring democracy to Pakistan. For this, she employs identity formation techniques to present herself as a product of education in the American intellectual atmosphere of the early 1970’s. The focus of this research is on narratological strategies employed in Benazir Bhutto’s world making in a globalised world. It emphasizes that her narrative techniques seem to accommodate American political projects in South East Asia. In doing so, this research sheds light on the way Benazir Bhutto disentangles herself from her father’s politics who had resisted American policies using anti-imperialist stratagems, and who had accused American government to have planned his downfall.  The research explores how her autobiographical narratives shows her perched between these two opposing forces in such a way as to suggest her vision of the future of democracy in her country.