Postcolonial feminist reading of Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns

Postcolonial feminism is an exploration into the interactions of colonialism with gender, nation, class, race, and sexualities in different contexts of women’s lives. Postcolonial feminism or the ‘Third World feminism’ originated as a critique of mainstreams in the Western feminist theorists, investigating the portrayal of women in the literature and society of the colonized countries as marginalized and oppressed ones in every aspect of life, namely, cultural, religious, political, economic, social, legal and artistic, in such a way that they are considered as inferior beings. Postcolonial feminism declares that an inclination towards homogenizing and universalizing women by focusing exclusively on the involvement of women in Western lifestyle is a heedless attempt, because in this case, they are only defined by their gender and not by social class, race, feelings, ethnicity, sexual preferences, and setting of the colonized territories. Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns depicts the social, cultural, and political structures that support the devaluation, degradation, and violence endured by the female characters in the novel. From a postcolonial feministic perspective, this paper attempts to investigate the plights of women, particularly the two major characters of the novel, Mariam and Laila, which are enforced on them through the patriarchal culture and standards.