Racial Metamorphosis: A Critical Examination of The Last White Man through Race Theory

Abstract

This paper assesses Mohsin Hamid The Last White Man (2022) using Race Theory with emphasis on the theme of racial transmutation as well as a questioning of conventional understanding of race and racism. The primary concern of the study is to discuss whether or not the social construct of race can be negotiated with the help of Hamid’s narrative revealing a world where an entire population turns racial overnight. In doing so, however, the novel foregrounds a host of potential further social implications that a new form of racial identity entails, such as the erasure of African American race itself. The study is relevant to today’s social justice demonstrations concerning Blacks and other people of color due to policies that seek to end racism. Despite this apparent lack of attention to race, through constructing a vision of a post-racial society, Hamid’s novel delivers a race critique, and obliges the reader to contemplate the horizons of a racially reconfigured globe. As a qualitative study, the present work approaches textual analysis and conducts a close reading of Hamid’s work to analyze how it challenges race as a category. As earlier indicated, the study utilizes Delgado and Stefancic Critical Race Theory (2023) as the theoretical framework of the study. The observations suggest that the movement of a racial switch over in the novel subverts the traditional systems of social justice, and demands the readers rethink strategies of racism. Contrary to a vision of a post-racial world, Hamid offers confusion of identities, use of violence, and consequent instability. Thus, the topical theme of the racial transformation in the novel becomes a trigger for intensive self-recursive and sociocritical analysis of the present hierarchies and points out the relative racism nature as an absolute farce of the biological categorization approach, instead of which it should be recognized as the recognized social construct.