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

Thus, for instance, Kenneth Chan makes a case for Timothy Mo’s Sour Sweet (1982) as one of those seminal texts that helped to open up “an otherwise culturally insular British literary establishment” to Asian authors—in particular, Chinese immigrant writers. An extension of this can be seen in Tamara Wagner’s consideration of Ooi Yang-May’s The Flame Tree (1998), a novel that, in Wagner’s view, effects a clever and sustainable parody of certain typical manoeuvres found in diasporic narratives. A variation on this essentially metacritical mode is also evident in the essays by Wendy O’Shea Meddour and Ruth Maxey, both of whom offer critiques of the kinds of commentary that their chosen authors tend to attract. O’Shea-Meddour performs both an analysis of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and an illustration of why existing critical responses to the novel are limited, arguing convincingly that interpretation in this instance is all too often a reductive affair. Alternatively, Maxey examines the critical reception of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) in the context provided by the history of British Asian writing and argues that that very context generates a burden of realist representation which should not be the only manner of approaching a novel. In this respect, our contributors echo Gadamer’s argument that the “history of effect” (Wirkungsgeschichte) of a work forms an integral part of its horizon of meaning.

What is interesting here is that this charge of realist expectation is simultaneously met and disavowed in certain British Asian works through an examination of the tensions that can arise between performativity and authenticity. Leila Neti points out for instance that the protagonist in Meera Syal’s coming-of-age novel Anita and Me (1996) uses locally accented speech to help her “pass” in ways foreclosed by her “visibly racialized body”. Furthermore, this insider-outsider dynamic is intrinsically tied to her linguistic formation and social-psychological maturation. Meera Syal’s second novel, Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999), is discussed, in turn, by Dave Gunning, who shows how Syal criticises illiberal practices masquerading under the rubric “tradition” even as she affirms its value (in reconstituted form) in the novel’s closure because it helps her protagonists achieve “personal and social stability”.