British Asian Fiction: Framing the Contemporary By Neil Murphy an ...

Additionally, the essays seek to delineate the complex subject positions explored by authors and texts, and will focus on the way that the authors negotiate the exigencies of their location within and between different social formations. If it is a commonplace that divided national/ethnic loyalties or otherwise foregrounded problematisations of Britishness is an important motif among some of the writers discussed here, and if it is the case that British literature can no longer be discussed in monocultural terms because of their undeniable impact, it is also the case that the diverse intercultural, transcultural, and transnational positions explored in these works are often less specified than proclaimed. In his introduction to a collection of essays on multicultural fiction, A. Robert Lee argued over a decade ago that formulations such as Asian-British and Caribbean-British can be further “particularised” into, say, Cardiff-Bengali or Brixton-Jamaican, meaning that the terms contain their own freight of “heterogeneity” and “tension”.¹ The implied injunction was that critical elaboration of writers deemed “multicultural” needed to pay scrupulous attention to the material and negotiated specificities of different migrant encounters if it wished to do justice to the then-still-emerging fiction. Nevertheless, in the intervening period, this important admonition has at times been overlooked. Migrant and postmigrant writing tends to be aligned under the sign of hybridity. However, as Andrew Smith correctly points out, “it can seem as if the disclosure of cultural hybridity is [considered to be], in itself, somehow automatically radicalizing”. Thus he cautions, “it is worth remembering that hybridity is a quality of narratives or discourses in specific circumstances, rather than a quality that is radical in its own right”.² Regardless of whether the discussed works enjoin an expansion of the cultural and semantic parameters of Britishness (or Englishness), the essays in the collection will contribute to that specification.

The writer John Banville has suggested, echoing Adorno, that “[t]he unresolved antagonisms of reality reappear in art in the guise of immanent problems of artistic form. This, and not the deliberate injection of objective moments or social content, defines art’s relation to society”.³