Deconstructing Power: Ideologies, Webs of Hyper-reality and Metanarratives in Hamid’s The Spinner’s Tale

This research explores the ideologies that help individuals gain power and control over people through the analysis of Omer Shahid Hamid’s The Spinner’s Tale. Main characters in the novel, like Ausi and Omer, have used religious ideology to empower and attain their personal objectives. Political, religious, and social ideologies are narratives simulated through media and feigns to extend political power. This qualitative study tries to bridge the social and religious ideologies through a theoretical framework of hyper-reality and concept of metanarrative. The intertwined postmodern theorists included Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Fredric Jameson to help reveal the construction of dominant/totalizing metanarratives. This study tries to fill the gap through exploring post-9/11 socio-political anxieties bridging contemporary Pakistani literary criticism. The idea mirrors local narratives, broadening global discourses of terrorism intervened through hyper-real constructs of media and state power. The article develops strong argument to mark digital saturation, surveillance, and ideological fragmentation in present era disclosing Pakistan struggling with identity, belonging, and resistance through narrative of The Spinner’s Tale. The findings indicate towards an intentional vagueness of the novel's inference to highlight the necessity to inquire the narratives that are popular in postcolonial societies through the lens of a postmodern theoretical framework.