Literature,Critique,and Empire Today

Hanif Kureishi has consistently interrogated the concept of home in his writing, especially in texts produced between 1981 and 1997, the period in which he most actively considers issues of race, ethnicity, nationhood and diaspora. Critics of Kureishi's work have generally examined notions of home and identity formation in relation to his second-generation South Asian British characters, but have rarely paid sustained attention to the development of such ideas through his first-generation figures. Thus, beyond some insightful readings of individual South Asian immigrants in a few key texts, Kureishi scholarship currently lacks a fuller discussion of the important, enduring role played by the first generation across his oeuvre; of female migrants; and of the more problematic aspects of these representations. This article addresses such gaps by exploring first-generation selfhood in relation to home (as both nation and domestic space) and return throughout Kureishi's writing, positing reasons for his compulsive textual reliance on these questions.

After showing how White Teeth enacts a dialectic between determinism and chance from which the latter emerges as the winner, the article investigates how such a metaphysic affects Zadie Smith's notion of identity in The Autograph Man where identity becomes a series of gestures through which, individually, we make pragmatic self-presentations. At the same time, an identity is also produced for us socially, which never matches our own self-presentation. Thus social relations are informed by a dynamic of chance and instability and conducted through a process of interpretation and misinterpretation which, dependent as it is on communication, may actually enhance the prospect of social communion. While this model of identity is particularly fitted to postmodern, multicultural society, its origins in Epicureanism and its literary affinity with comedy suggest that Smith's notion of identity owes more to the comedic inclination of novels than to any political imperatives.

What does it mean to be at home in the world? This essay explores how modern cosmopolitanism might paradoxically emerge through an embrace of domesticity and kinship. I argue that cosmopolitanism should be less invested in a traditional idea of feeling “at home” in the world and more committed to recognizing “the world” through the home. As Amitav Ghosh's fiction illuminates the intimacy between the familial and the foreign, his work suggests that a robust cosmopolitan sensibility requires close attention to the energies of domestic life. As Ghosh's work teaches us to understand the home and the world as collaborative rather than competing realities, his concern for home enables a contemporary cosmopolitanism that critiques masculinist and imperialist visions of world citizenship.

This article is located at the crossroads between language and literature which postcolonial studies is beginning to confront. I explore language politics in a postcolonial context through an analysis of codeswitching in Dev Virahsawmy's Toufann (1991), a rewriting of Shakespeare's The Tempest in Mauritian Creole. I argue that in Virahsawmy's play the prominent juxtaposition of different languages, over and above different registers, fulfils important metaphorical functions. I investigate, in particular, how the strategic deployment of languages by Virahsawmy not only affects the perceived identity of his characters and his own narrative voice, but also interacts with the wider ideological framework within which he writes. Finally Virahsawmy's codeswitching strategy sheds light on the enabling if persistently ambivalent role of Shakespeare in a postcolonial context.

The Western circus tradition provides a particularly relevant framework for representations of animals in magic realist fiction, since magic realism and the circus are both closely related to Bakhtin's idea of the carnivalesque. Conceptualized as “circensian spaces”, the circus' influence on magical realism manifests itself as what Foucault calls “heterotopias”, “other spaces”, which are inherently contradictory, polyphonic, and “impossible to think”. As the circus traditionally represents, reinforces and at the same time subverts Western conceptualizations of animals, this discussion focuses on the relationship between Linnaean taxonomy and circensian spaces in Peter Carey's Illywhacker, Richard Flanagan's Gould's Book of Fish, Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits. This article examines the significance of circensian animal spaces within the Australian and Latin American contexts, and discusses why “circensian animals” may be particularly suitable agents in the subversion of Western paradigms.

The aesthetic of the sublime and its political effects have not been investigated extensively in postcolonial studies. In the case of South Africa, it has been deemed–following an influential argument by J.M. Coetzee–to have played a minor role. Yet the evocation of landscape as sublime is significant for understanding the complex processes of identity formation that are involved in particular instances of colonial settlement. This article pays attention to a troubling version of the sublime evident in the controversial Afrikaans-language activist Dan Roodt's evocations of the Karoo landscape. In Roodt's writing, the sublime can be read as an attempt to deal with the otherness not only of the landscape, but also of its inhabitants. It tends, in his case, to have a dehistoricizing effect in questioning the autochthony of local black inhabitants of the landscape while uneasily attempting to assert white rights over it.

Taking as its object of study Johann S. Lee's Peculiar Chris (1992) and Andrew Koh's Glass Cathedral (1995), this essay considers the ways in which the relationship between queer identities and (trans)nationalism is construed in two Singapore “coming out” novels. How does their status as writing emerging from a particular postcolonial urban site inflect the significance of their literary-stylistic choices? What kinds of affiliations are affirmed, what ties are disavowed? While the thematization of homosexuality in the Singapore context does not automatically make such texts “subversive”, gay writing brings sharply into focus the problematics arising from a confluence of nationalist and global discourses–in this case, globalized notions of a transnational gay identity originating largely from the West. Drawing on and explicitly announcing their participation in a larger body of gay protest literature, these texts offer a valuable opportunity for reflecting on how transnationalism might enable queer subjects to challenge and revise nationally endorsed models of masculinity; at the same time, the extent to which their efforts to articulate a queer identity might compromise their “Singaporeanness” is considered.

Japanese-Canadian writer Kerri Sakamoto is the author of two novels. The Electrical Field (1998) won the Commonwealth Writers Prize Best First Book award and the Canada-Japan Literary Award. One Hundred Million Hearts followed in 2003. In this interview she talks to Pilar Cuder-Domínguez about how she started writing and about her current projects. She discusses the topics and issues she is most concerned with–particularly the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War II and its lasting consequences, and how they came together in the two novels she has published to date. Sakamoto mentions those writers whose work has most influenced her own and describes what it means to be a Japanese-Canadian Sansei writer.

In this interview, the distinguished Singaporean novelist Suchen Christine Lim discusses her formative years as a writer, her process of writing and how she came to write her four novels–Ricebowl (1984), Gift from the Gods (1990), Fistful of Colours (1993) and A Bit of Earth(2001)–in an overwrought state, feeling “infected with the writer's virus”. She also explains why and how she came to write in the English language, how she divides her allegiance between Malaysia, the country where she was born and spent her childhood, and Singapore, the country she later chose to make her home; and why place, memory and history are such important, recurring themes in her fiction. Finally, she talks about the position of the writer in Singapore and how its “good life” poses a threat to his/her creativity; the state of women in the region and in her own fiction; and how regional critics could invigorate the literary scene with more originality and “informed criticism” rather than merely dwelling in the shadow of their Western counterparts.