Table of Content

CHAPTER 01: INTRODUCTION1

(An Analysis of Hybrid identities in Brick Lane and Lonely Londoners)1

OVERVIEW1

BACKGROUND5

STATEMENT OF PURPOSE7

PURPOSE OF RESEARCH9

MAIN CONTRIBUTIONS9

RATIONALE10

LITERATURE SURVEY13

Brick Lane and the Ethics of Migrant Identity16

Ethical Concern18

Limitation19

Assumptions & Limitation20

WORK CITED21

CHAPTER 01: INTRODUCTION

(An Analysis of Hybrid identities in Brick Lane and Lonely Londoners)

OVERVIEW

Monica Ali's 2003 novel of Bangladeshi immigrants in London, Brick Lane, has been a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic. Because it is a realist narrative with a postcolonial story, it offers an excellent opportunity to examine the relationship between the formal strategies of mimetic fiction and the historical contexts of multiculturalism and immigration.1 In the chapter "Multicultural Personae" in The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000, Dominic Head has investigated "the hybridized cultural forms that might be produced in an evolving, and so genuinely, multicultural Britain" . The novels he looks at have much in common in terms of subject matter with Brick Lane; it is thus interesting that he addresses the question of the troubled relationship of postcolonialism and realism in a subsection titled "Ethnic Identity and Literary Form." He argues: (Afzal 137)

To understand entirely Head's argument, and indeed what he leaves out, we need briefly to sketch a critical genealogy. Head's understanding of the novel form stems in part from the project begun by Andrzej Ga¸siorek in Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After (2005) to refine the definition of realism in the wake of the attack mounted on it by British poststructuralism as embodied in Colin MacCabe's James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (2000) and Catherine Belsey's Critical Practice (1980). Head transposes this debate to the one regarding postcolonial literatures, attacking an imagined—and by no means unimaginable—scholar who celebrates magical realism at classical realism's expense. Interestingly, he does not reject utopian readings of magical realism; he merely suggests that such utopian readings can be made of texts in any mode. For many, however, it is precisely the novel form that is at stake. Philip Engblom, summarizing Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Mark Edmundson, suggests that Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children represents a "new postmodernism" (Edmundson 65; qtd. in Engblom 295). This form, Engblom argues, opens space "for the undiluted speech of a multitude of voices. Room is created for dialogue, shrill as it sometimes becomes, between innumerable, irreducible claims, visions, and ideologies with no ultimate authority held in reserve by any of them that guarantee the outcome" . This sort of hybridity becomes a postcolonial attack on the "strategies of containment" inherent to the realist novel (Afzal-Khan 137; qtd. in Engblom 295). Such a reading, as we shall see, is legitimated by Rushdie's own comments about the novel in general and his own output in particular. (Ahmad 10)

This celebration of Rushdie's formal innovation leads us to another problem. Engblom's characteristic application of Mikhail Bakhtin to postcolonial literature is open to the critique of applying Western postmodernism to postcolonial forms; by making Rushdie an example of a general "dialogism" in literature, the specific Indian contexts of his work are somewhat erased. The danger here ...