Nation-building novels are novels which attempt to weave the experiences, values and richness of a variety of cultures, language groups and social contexts into a national heritage that creates a sense ofnational identity and identification for all people within a particular nation-state. This dissertation explores how Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie, Keri Hulme's The Bone People and Margaret Laurence's The Diviners all use the particularly illuminating metaphor of family to explore nation-building in India, New Zealand and Canada respectively. In questioning traditional definitions of family through the image of the adopted child (or changeling in the case of Midnight's Children), the novels also explore new ways of understanding "belonging" and the "other". Since the meaning of these terms is rooted in the past, these novels also question the "truth" of the past by exposing the fallibility of memory. In chapter one a working definition of "nation" and "nation-building" is given and the vision, purpose and characteristic features of nation-building novels are discussed. Chapter two focuses on Rushdie's novel in which the metaphor of pickling is used to explore history not as a collection of hard facts but as a conglomeration of subjective, sensuous, manufactured and carefully created and preserved flavours. In chapter three Hulme's novel is discussed, particularly in relation to what is "other" and the importance of names. The narrator's idea of "commensalism" is explored as an ideal of syncrecity which does not deny individual identity. Chapter four looks at the development from consolation to contradiction to construction in the development of a hybrid national identity in Laurence's novel. Chapter five looks at the narrative techniques used in order to convey the prophetic nature of the novels' message and discusses the importance of the intertexts of each novel. Chapter six focuses on belonging as it looks at the return of each narrator to her/his symbolic or literal home. The chapter also discusses how the novels attack linearity by separating "time" and "space" (instances of social interaction) from "place" (specific geographical locations) in order to "disembed" their message to emphasise its universal applicability. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1998.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Canterbury, 2006. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 113-120). Also available via the World Wide Web.

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.