Manichaeanism and Decolonial Praxis: The Dismantling of Western Gaze in Shazaf Fatima Haider’s How It Happened

Abstract

This research takes a decolonial tenet, Manichaeanism, addressed by Frantz Fanon’s in The Wretched of the Earth (1963) and employs to Shazaf Fatima Haider’s novel How It Happened (2012). According to Fanon's Manichaean concept, colonial system establishes a forceful binary framework between colonial power versus colonial subjects, which vitalizes systems of dominance founded on race and cultural traits. The study also uses a postcolonial framework by integrating decolonial lens to analyze that how Haider depicts and manifests colonial dualities that work across class systems, gender roles, and Western cultural invasion. In this regard, the analytical part explores the novelist’s challenge of traditional colonial margins within a detailed text analysis that illustrates decolonial practices through reformed definitions of identity, narrative control, and personal capabilities. Further, Fanon's theory is used in this study to address how postcolonial spaces still keep Manichaean structures in the indigenous settings and how important South Asian contemporary literature is in grappling these hierarchies. Hence, this study adds to decolonial scholarship by demonstrating that Haider’s novel creates spaces that challenge and remodel ideologies.

Keywords: Decolonization, Manichaeanism, Western gaze, postcolonial literature, Shazaf Fatima Haider, South Asian fiction