Abstract
The city is framed through classic Orientalist imagery, with swarthy, inscrutable men with kohl-rimmed eyes and scarves concealing all manner of weapons. [...]the film's "Lahore" is actually Delhi - where Nair shot the film after failing to get insurance coverage for shooting in Pakistan. Placeless-ness is something Hamid has experimented with elsewhere, most notably his 2011 short story, "Terminator: Attack of the Drones," in which he describes the devastated, post-apocalyptic landscape of the Pakistani frontier provinces using a Faulknerian language of the US South. Besides for the unconventional language, Pakistan itself is never mentioned; the only clues that the story takes place in Pakistan is the fact that the landscape is ravaged by predatory drones. The drones become the index of locality here, but in doing so demarcate locality as a function of a larger geopolitical project, in which Pakistan is the unwitting participant. [...]in Hamid's story, placeless-ness is not a nod towards universality, or what one reviewer mistakenly calls "archetypal resonance,"[9] but a powerful statement on the diminishing significance of specificity in contexts such as the drone war. The death of more than 1000 garment factory workers in the collapse of the Rana Plaza building on April 24, 2013 in greater Dhaka brought to the world's attention the importance of Bangladesh as the site where the human cost of global outsourcing is brutally exposed, and where the effects of the shutting down of unions and the lack of corporate accountability that are inevitable results of global capitalism can no longer be rendered invisible.