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Sincock, Kristina

Title: '"We reportin you for racism, man, you going down”’: representing male youth in contemporary British Asian novels
Creator: Sincock, Kristina
Relation: University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
Resource Type: thesis
Date: 2019
Description: Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Description: This thesis examines the debut novels of three contemporary British Asian authors and identifies the way they can be differentiated from earlier texts which consider Indian identity. I argue that these texts act as a repudiation of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), as well as of many other early twenty-first-century novels concerning minority ethnicity communities in London. The chapters of this thesis follow a trajectory of characterisations in these novels which indicates an increasing demand for British Asian identity to be freed from mainstream audiences’ desire for texts which depict the ethnic subject as an exotic Other. In my examination of these texts I employ a methodology which works from a postcolonial theoretical basis, but I combine this analysis with a new formalist approach. Understandings of the ethnic subject produced by theories of hybridity and mimicry, particularly those theories articulated by Homi K. Bhabha, have begun a process of emancipation of this subject from essentialist and stereotypical depictions. But I argue that in some cases these approaches have themselves led to characterisations that are prone to predictable and restricting tropes and motifs. In my readings of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006) and Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism (2006), paratext and metatext are closely examined to reveal complex and ambivalent notions of ethnic identity. I argue that the formal techniques used by the contemporary authors examined here expose a tendency towards persistent and insidious racism in depictions of British Asians, depictions which have often been produced by minority ethnic authors themselves. The representations of British Asian youth produced by Kureishi, Malkani and Dhaliwal either employ parody as an indication of the redundancy of stereotype in providing authentic portrayals of the ethnic subject, or rely on what are often confronting and offensive characterisations, which expose the mainstream reader’s expectation of depictions of an assimilatory and worthy migrant figure. These novels mark a new direction in British Asian fiction, one in which there is a demand for portrayals that reject the exoticisation and essentialisation of the migrant figure, and also relate the inherent complexity and contradiction in writing ethnic minority characters. This demand is part of a broader social context in which gender, sexuality and class might be considered just as influential on social mobility as is ethnicity, and in which minority communities are empowered to assert their right to contribute to an ongoing redefining of Britishness.
Subject: contemporary novels; identity; new formalism; British Asian; contemporary authors
Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1397763
Identifier: uon:34351
Language: eng
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'"We reportin you for racism, man, you going down”’: representing male youth in contemporary British Asian novels