Intersecting Structures of Power and Fragmented Belonging: A Crenshawian Reading of Kamila Shamsie’s Best of Friends

Abstract

Although Kamila Shamsie’s Best of Friends has been examined through trauma, friendship, postcolonial identity, and representational politics, the simultaneous role of class, gender, race, structural power, and mediated representation remains comparatively underexplored. This paper employs Kimberle Crenshaw’s concepts of structural, political, and representational intersectionality to address this gap. Through qualitative close textual analysis, it examines selected scenes involving aristocratic schooling, social hierarchy, digital media, familial discipline, and occupational ethics. It argues that formally equal institutions often produce unequal outcomes across class lines; familial authority regulates female responses through ideas of respectability; elite privilege transfers risk to lower-class subjects; and manipulated online images circulate racialized and gendered meanings through digital media. The narrative, therefore, shows how control, recognition, and authority reshape friendship and apparently shared identities. This article claims that Best of Friends portrays power and belonging as interconnected rather than separate categories. In doing so, it contributes to debates on social hierarchy, friendship, and mediated representation in contemporary Pakistani Anglophone fiction through Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality.