Urban spaces have appeared in literature for a long time and they seem to fascinate a lot of contemporary writers. The constructions of cities become exceptionally complex in postcolonial British fiction that portrays urban landscape from the perspective of first and second generation immigrants from Britain's former colonies. All of the novels discussed in this work are set in London and the characters are immigrants of the South Asian and Caribbean diasporas in Britain: the thesis focuses namely on Brick Lane (Monica Ali), White Teeth (Zadie Smith) and Life Isn't All Ha Ha Hee Hee (Meera Syal). However, the work also makes short digressions to a number of older works which deal with the immigrant experience in London: The Lonely Londoners (Sam Selvon), The Satanic Verses (Salman Rushdie) and The Buddha of Suburbia (Hanif Kureishi). The entire thesis consists of five parts and begins with an introduction to several theoretical terms that are necessary for analyses of immigrant identities and urban spaces. All of the theory that is discussed in the first chapter is then applied to the chosen novels by Ali, Smith and Syal. Overall, the thesis focuses on the ways in which the ex-colonial subjects in the books perceive London according to their gender and the particular generation of immigrants that...

This essay focuses on the topics of sexism and the function of gender and oppression in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. Instances in the novel are related to real world incidents in order to show how Ali, in spite of her Western upbringing and perspective, has accurately depicted several problematical cases of injustice in Muslim culture. Even though Ali has been criticized for her, supposedly, incorrect portrayal of Bangladeshis in London, this essay will argue that the topics of the novel remain relevant in the larger scheme of Muslim society.

This thesis uses affect theory and studies of emotion to analyse literary representations of the everyday in fictional and non-fictional writing about Muslim migrant women in the UK from 1906 to 2012. Postcolonial literary studies tend to value exceptional events over mundane life, which causes possible issues of exoticism and a danger of homogenising distinct experiences. This thesis offers a theorisation of migration that foregrounds everyday experience through an engagement with theories of objects, bodies and space, as well as emotional experiences that are specific to migrant subjectivity. It analyses two groups of texts: early twentieth century travel writing by Atiya Fyzee, Shahbano Begum Maimoona Sultan and Zeyneb Hanoum, and contemporary literary texts by Yeshim Ternar, Farhana Sheikh, Monica Ali, Leila Aboulela, Elif Shafak and Fadia Faqir. The thesis is structured thematically into three sections, each section containing two chapters, one about travel writing and another about contemporary texts. In the first section, in order to examine how the texts negotiate foreignness in daily life, I consider hospitality theory, which describes how social power relations are based on roles of host and guest. In the second section, I argue that melancholia is an emotional experience endemic to migrancy. The texts demonstrate how this emotion is manifest communally as well as individually, which also shows the political potential of emotion. In the third section, I investigate how emotional processes of migration are described spatially in the texts. The findings of this research show that emotional knowledge is a major concern for migrant writers as a way of engaging with and critiquing the social and political climates of each text. This is produced through narrations about feeling in general and specific emotions, such as irritation or anxiety. Emotional experience is illustrated in conjunction with identities that are both fluid and intersectional, where gender and class converge with ethnicity and religion. The texts also show specifically affective styles of writing that concentrate on focalising women's intimate experiences through, for example, diary entries, bildungsroman or psychological realism. While the differing contexts reflect the particularities of each experience, there are sufficient similarities of narrative content and style to suggest that affective experience is a major concern for this body of literature. Overall, this thesis demonstrates the productive uses of affect theory as a critical stance for analysing postcolonial literature.