Home and Diasporic Belonging: Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia

Subject Areas : All areas of language and translation

Morteza  Lak ¹ (Assistant Professor of English Literature,English Department. Faculty of Literature, Humanities, and Social Sciences Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch, Tehran)

Received: 2021-01-13 Accepted : 2021-01-13 Published : 2020-10-01

Keywords: Home, Hanif Kureishi, Sam Selvon, Postcolonialism, Belonging,

Abstract :

The current paper examines the ways the concepts of ̳home‘ and ̳belonging‘ are conceived, accepted, and imagined by the characters of Sam Selvon‘s The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Hanif Kureishi‘s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). Taken from two different but close-knit periods in twentieth-century Eng- land, the 1950s and the late 1970s, the novels represent the socio-political circumstances that formulated, and consolidated the discursive and ideological constructs, the operation of which had been aimed at im- peding the immigrant characters‘ conceptualisation of England as home. The paper explains the moments in the narratives that testify to the systematic discriminating and undermining practices via which the pro- tagonists‘ consciousness of home is destabilised, if not completely torpedoed. Employing postcolonial criticism as the theoretical framework, the current study unravels that although the British immigration policies in the periods in question encouraged multiculturalism, there was a handful of cultural and eco- nomic issues that practically impinged on the full realisation of such an anticipation. To this end, built upon the postcolonial theories of less acknowledged thinkers as Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Avtar Brah, whose theories enjoy identity- and race-related imbrications, the research underpins the transitory exposi- tion of the meaning of home, belonging, and diasporic nostalgia. It will demonstrate that the discursive representation of immigration proves that home and belonging are defined essentially not on the basis of multiculturalism, but on that of ideological and racial dogma, as the novels in question illustrate.

References:

Althusser, Louis. (2014). On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological States Apparatuses. Trans. G. M. Goshga- rian. London: Verso Books.

Bhabha, Homi K. (1984). ―Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.‖ October, 28, 125-133. (1994). The Loca- tion of Culture. New York: Routledge.

Boehmer, Elleke. (2005). Colonial and postco- lonial literature. Oxford: Oxford Universi- ty Press.

Brah, Avtar. (2005). Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge.

Chowdhury, Kanishka. (1998). Rev. of The Poli- tics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction, by Rosemary M.

George. MFS, 44 (2), 471-473.
Dyer, Rebecca. (2002). ―Immigration, Postwar

London, and the Politics of Everyday Life in Sam Selvon‘s Fiction.‖ Cultural Criti- que, 52, 108-144.

Gilroy, Paul. (2000). Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Gilroy, Paul. (1991). There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack. Chicago: University of Chica- go Press.

Hall, Stuart. (2000). New ethnicities. In James Proctor (ed.), Writing Black Britain 1948- 1998 (pp. 265-275). Manchester: Manches- ter University Press.

Hall, Stuart. (1993). Minimal selves. In Ann Gray and Jim McGuigan (eds.), Studying Cul- ture: An Introductory Reader (134-139). London: Routledge, 1993.

Kabesh, Lisa M. (2011). ―Mapping freedom, or its limits: the politics of movement in Sam Selvon‘s The Lonely Londoners.‖ Postco- lonial Texts, 6 (3), 1-17.

Kureishi, Hanif. (1990). The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Faber and Faber.

Manchester: Manchester University Press. Selvon, Sam. (1956). The Lonely Londoners. New York: Longman.

Waters, Rob. (2019). Thinking Black: Britain, 1964-1985. California: University of Cali- fornia Press.