The novel doesn't suggest that there's some fundamental essence of whiteness or some fundamental characteristic of which all white people partake. It talks instead or it explores instead a story where it's impossible to tell who is or was white and who isn't. For some, it's been argued that the book sort of advocates this anti-white or sort of white genocide kind of a positionWhich is completely absurd without giving too much away. None of them is killed. One dies of natural causes and the rest make it happily to the end. And I think it's quite likely a few hundred years from now, we will again not think of race in the terms that we think of it today.
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Anders wakes up one day to find that his skin has turned dark. Soon it transpires that this is happening to people all over the land, leading first to panic which then turns into an upheaval in establishment, power, and compassion.
In this Kafka-esque tale, award-winning Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid explores how we as a society define the concepts and structures of race, and how much in turn we let them define us. To delve deeper into The Last White Man, Mohsin Hamid joins us on the podcast, in conversation with BBC broadcaster Razia Iqbal.
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