In this study, Nyla Ali Khan focuses on the representation of South
Asian life in works by four contemporary Anglophone writers: V. S.
Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, and Anita Desai.
Concentrating on the intertwined topics of nationalism,
transnationalism, and fundamentalism, Khan offers a critical
dialogue between these works and the contemporary history they
encounter, using history to interrogate fiction and using fiction
to think through historical issues. In doing so, Khan argues that
in the mixed, heterogeneous space of transnationalism, cultural and
linguistic authenticity is a pipe dream. The binary structures
created by the colonial encounter undergo a process of dialectical
interplay in which each culture or language makes incursions into
the other. Some of these structures are as follows: black-white,
primitive-savage, self-other, silent-articulate, rational ruler and
irrational ruled. These categories generate a dichotomy that
creates the perception that a people have of themselves and their
political and social relationships. Their recognition of this
dialogic interplay of community and place becomes the basis for
strategies that enable transnational and postcolonial writers to
revise dogmatic categories. Despite all their differences, the
works of these authors delineate the asymmetrical relations of
colonialism and the aftermath of this phenomenon as it is
manifested across the globe in this day and age. Khan shows, for
instance, how Naipaul articulates a sensibility created by
multilayered identities and the remapping of old imperial
landscapes, in the process suggesting a new dynamic of power
relations in which politics and selfhood, empire and psychology,
prove to be profoundly interrelated; how Rushdie encourages a
nationalist self-imagining and a rewriting of history that
incorporates significant cultural, religious, and linguistic
differences into our sense of identity; how Ghosh is critical of
the putative cultural and religious necessity to forge a unified
nationalist identity, arguing that no single theory sufficiently
frames the multiple inheritances of present diasporic
subjectivities; and how Desai seeks to imagine a responsible form
of artistic, social, and political agency.
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