Digital Surveillance and the Politics of Citizenship in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

Abstract

In the contemporary world of digital era, every human activities and deeds are observed through digital surveillance. Citizenship in the twenty-first century is increasingly shaped by digital surveillance, state security and border control. The rights of individuals are negotiated through technologies of monitoring and suspicion. In the aftermath of the September eleven attacks, surveillance has become a defining feature of national security policies, particularly affecting Muslim communities whose identities are frequently scrutinized through political and digital mechanisms. Kamila Shamsie, one of the most significant contemporary Pakistani novelists, explores these concerns in her novel Home Fire (2017). In the novel she portrays the complex relationship between citizenship, state authority and personal identity in contemporary Britain. Through the experiences of the fictional characters from the novel, Shamsie demonstrates how surveillance extends beyond physical observation to encompass border inspections, intelligence gathering, digital communication, and media representation. All these transform a person’s citizenship into a conditional rather than an unconditional right. The aim of this paper is to examine how digital surveillance influences the politics of citizenship and shapes the characters’ experiences of belonging, exclusion and state control. The novel presents surveillance as a mechanism of power that transforms citizenship from a legal status into a contested political condition.