The centre, peripheries, and filth in Mohsin Hamid’s "How to get filthy rich in Rising Asia"

The article examines Mohsin Hamid’s third novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), by focusing on the problem of filth, understood metaphorically, in moral and formal terms, but above all literally, in terms of actual pollution and lack of access to clean water in the economically fastest growing region, plagued by disastrous social inequality. The novel, written in the form of a second-person self-help guidebook, is analysed against the background of the Pakistani author’s whole literary output. Drawing upon anthropological and philosophical/sociological studies, Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger as well as Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted Lives and Liquid Fear, the article presents Hamid’s ecologically and ethically engaged work as itself an impure, hybrid text which, like all of Hamid’s writings, challenges the "centre" vs. "margins" hierarchy, and is characterised by a boundary-blurring, and system-changing ambition.