| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語研究所 === 88 === This thesis reads Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album in the context of postcolonial literature and sees them as a representation of the politics and poetics of survival in postcolonial London. Kureishi struggles against any kind of domination on two fronts: the first one is the white-dominated British national discourse, and the second one is the black cultural discourse. His double-edged interventions in these related discourses in effect have redefined the so-called Englishness as well as Blackness.
The introductory chapter illustrates the social and historical background of Kureishi’s fiction. It is necessary to understand the history of black immigration in Britain after the dismantling of British Empire in order to capture the significance of Kureishi’s novels. I argue that colonial practices have been re-imposed upon black peoples in Britain, and London is a new empire within Britain (to appropriate Salman Rushdie’s notion). In this conception, the postcolonial refers to the time after the end of formal colonialism on the one hand, and the need for a second decolonization of the imperialist residues in the British society on the other. I also try to position Hanif Kureishi in the English literary field, regarding him as representing the new generation of black writers who were born and bred in Britain and who identify themselves as British as well as black.
The second chapter, which discusses The Buddha of Suburbia, examines the race and class issues the first and second generations of the Asian immigrants face with and their attitudes toward these issues, and how the protagonist Karim Amir comes to recognize his multiple identity. My argument is that, it is in creative translation that a black Briton with Pakistani roots can really live through the racial and class hostilities. Creative translation, therefore, is a politics and poetics of survival in postcolonial London.
Chapter 3 reads The Black Album in the context of the Rushdie Affair exploded in 1989. Kureishi’s novel sharply critiques the Muslim fundamentalists’ project to forge a pure Islamic identity. Instead of submitting to the repressive dogmas of fundamentalism, Kureishi celebrates literature as a path to live through the complexity and uncertainty of lived reality. In this way, he has expressed his strong solidarity with Salman Rushdie. It is only in embracing uncertainties that a postcolonial subject can really come to terms with the postcolonial multiple identity.
My conclusion is that, with The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, Kureishi has intervened into the British national discourse and the black British cultural discourse at the same time. Kureishi’s fiction is a part of the cultural products that has shifted the black British cultural politics from what Stuart Hall has called Identity Politics One, which constructs the black as a singular category, to a new phase which celebrates “new ethnicities, multiple identities.” Kureishi also contests against the notion of Englishness, arguing that the black is also a part of the British. Therefore, as a whole, Kureishi’s fiction has redefined Blackness and Englishness.
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