This essay aims to analyze the main characters of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia. The main characters embark on a metaphorical journey against a backdrop of turbulent socio-political changes in 1970s Britain, ending with the emergence of neoliberalism and the rise of Margaret Thatcher. While the previous research primarily focuses on the formation of identity and race, I primarily examine Kureishi’s dramatization of neoliberal tendencies in the main characters. The theoretical framework of this analysis is based on two contrastive perspectives on neoliberalism: Michel Foucault and his somewhat positive concept of the entrepreneur of the self on one side, and Fredric Jameson and concepts of pastiche and loss of historicity as negative effects of neoliberalism on the other. The main argument is that Kureishi’s dramatization of neoliberal tendencies in the main characters is complex and contrastive by simultaneously reflecting and denying Foucault and Jameson. Thus, it challenges these two theoretical perspectives, which suggests that literary works might have a significant theoretical potency.

L'objectif de cette thèse est d'étudier trois romans écrits par des auteurs anglophones du Pakistan ou de l'Inde, à savoir Bapsi Sidhwa, Bharati Mukherjee et Hanif Kureishi. On pourrait être tenté de placer les trois écrivains de cette étude dans la catégorie «littérature des immigrants». Ils écrivent tous à un moment de migration de masse lorsque l'idée de «choc culturel» parmi les peuples occidentaux commence à être plus évidente. Les trois écrivains sont affectés par des thèmes qui apparaissent seulement de manière marginale dans le débat évoqué ci-dessus, l'accent étant principalement mis sur les difficultés culturelles et sociales des femmes dans la société indo-pakistanaise. Quant à Kureishi, la polarisation mentionnée ci-dessus suppose un accent très différent, impliquant la situation d'un Asiatique né et élevé dans la société occidentale. Dans cette évaluation globale du contexte idéologique et historique commun aux trois écrivains, il sera important d'examiner les attitudes spécifiques adoptées par chaque écrivain par rapport à son expérience personnelle. L'objectif principal de cette étude sera donc thématique, en se concentrant sur les préoccupations spécifiques de ces écrivains et sur la manière dont cela se manifeste dans leur représentation particulière des tensions en jeu. / The objective of this thesis is to study three novels written by English-speaking authors of Pakistan or India, namely Bapsi Sidhwa, Bharati Mukherjee and Hanif Kureishi. One might be tempted to place the three writers of this study in the category of "literature of immigrants." They all write at a time of mass migration when the idea of "cultural shock" among Western peoples begins to be more evident. All three writers are affected by themes which appear only marginally in the debate evoked above, much of the emphasis being on the cultural and social difficulties of women in Indo-Pakistani society. As for Kureishi, the polarization mentioned above assumes a very different emphasis, involving the situation of an Asian born and brought up inside Western society. Within this overall assessment of the ideological and historical context common to all three writers, it will thus be important to examine the specific attitudes adopted by each writer in relation to his or her own personal experience. The main focus of this study will therefore be thematic, centering on these writers’ specific preoccupations and the way this is seen in their peculiar depiction of the tensions at stake.

This thesis is concerned with transnational literature and writers of the Middle Eastern and South Asian diasporas. It argues that the diasporic position of the authors enables their roles as comprador subjects. The thesis maintains that the figure of the comprador is always acted upon by its ontological predisposition, so that diasporic positionality often involves a single subject which straddles and speaks from two or more different subject positions. Comprador authors can be said to be co-opted by Western metropolitan publishing companies who stand to benefit by marketing the apparent marginality of the homelands about which these authors write. The thesis therefore proceeds from the notion that such a diasporic position is the paradoxical condition of the transnational subject or writer. I submit that there is, to some degree, a questionable element in the common political and cultural suggestions that emerge upon closer evaluation of diasporic literature. Indeed, a charge of complicity has been levelled against authors who write, apparently, to service two distinct entities – the wish to speak on behalf of a minority collective, as well as the imperial ‘centre’ which is the intended interlocutor of the comprador author. However, it is this difference, the implied otherness or marginality of the outsider within, which I argue is sometimes used by diasporic writers as a way of articulating with ‘authenticity’ the cultures and politics of their erstwhile localities. This thesis is concerned, therefore, with the representation of ‘the East’ in four novels by diasporic, specifically comprador writers, namely Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. I suggest that the ‘third-world’ and transnational literature can also be a selling point for the transnational subject, whose representations may at times pander to preconceived ideas about ‘the Orient’ and its people. As an illustration of this double-bind, I offer a close reading of all the novels to suggest that on the one hand, the comprador author writes within the paradigm of the ‘writing back’ movement, as a counter-discourse to the Orientalist representations of the homeland. However, the corollary is that such an attempt to ‘write back’, in a sense, re-inscribes the very discourse it wishes to subvert, especially because the literature is aimed at a ‘Western’ audience. Moreover, the template of the comprador could be used to explain how a transnational post-9/11 text from an Afghan-American, for instance, may be put to the service of the imperial machine, and read, therefore, as a supporting document to the U.S. policy on Afghanistan.