This thesis looks at literature by two South Asian, diasporic writers, Jhumpa Lahiri and Monica Ali, as a space where creative, cross-­cultural and independent identities for diasporic women might be created. The central claim of the thesis is that diasporic migration affects South Asian women in particular ways. The most positive outcome is that these women adopt new trans-­border identities but that these remain shaped by class, culture and gender. Hence a working class milieu such as the one depicted by Monica Ali, leads to an immigrant, ghetto-­ised, community-­based identity, located solely in the land of adoption, with return or travel to the homeland no longer possible. However, the milieu imagined in Jhumpa Lahiri’s text, a middle-class, suburban environment, creates a solitary, transnational identity, lived between countries, where travel between the land of birth and the land of adoption remains accessible. / English / M.A. (English)

This thesis looks at literature by two South Asian, diasporic writers, Jhumpa Lahiri and Monica Ali, as a space where creative, cross-­cultural and independent identities for diasporic women might be created. The central claim of the thesis is that diasporic migration affects South Asian women in particular ways. The most positive outcome is that these women adopt new trans-­border identities but that these remain shaped by class, culture and gender. Hence a working class milieu such as the one depicted by Monica Ali, leads to an immigrant, ghetto-­ised, community-­based identity, located solely in the land of adoption, with return or travel to the homeland no longer possible. However, the milieu imagined in Jhumpa Lahiri’s text, a middle-class, suburban environment, creates a solitary, transnational identity, lived between countries, where travel between the land of birth and the land of adoption remains accessible. / English / M.A. (English)

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.

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