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

Nevertheless, Gunning finds more salutary the countervailing logic emerging from the interstices of the novel, as, for instance, in its depiction of raves and discos where a younger generation of British Asians endorse “alternative way[s]” of belonging, less encumbered by “inherited conception[s]” of communal identity.

In addition to wrestling with this issue, our contributors track what might be called a centrifugal moment in British Asian fiction. Like other authors in the wider writing community—Julian Barnes come to mind—the writers discussed here track cosmopolitan influences on contemporary life. They attempt to give shape to a post-Fordist environment marked by massive transnational material and cultural flows, as well as by global migration. Alan Robinson argues, for example, that Hari Kunzru’s Transmission (2004) is an intellectual comedy cum satire that raises philosophical questions about the construction or simulation of what we take to be “reality”, and about the nature of the self. Whether a world dominated by commodity culture allows meaningful autonomy is a key consideration for Kunzru, who, in Robinson’s words, “seems fascinated by the connections between inauthenticity in the individual and in social practices”. In a similar vein, Wai-chew Sim argues that Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans (2000) offers a “cognitive mapping” of late capitalist modernity through its appropriation of the detective narrative form and its rewriting of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. In the process, the usurpation of surplus value from the periphery is highlighted together with the issue of radical systemic change. Andrew Ng, too, seeks to formulate new theoretical frames in his reading of Salman Rushdie’s Fury (2001) as a Gothic artefact within the context of the postcolonial subject’s response to postmodernity and postcoloniality while Neil Murphy reads Rushdie’s recent novel Shalimar the Clown (2005) as a negative example of the problems that arise when a totalising political discourse literalises the allegorical mode.

In addition, the legacy of postmodernism is also attended to in Joel Kuortti’s assessment of Sunetra Gupta’s A Sin of Colour (1999), in which its two main characters are taken as demonstrating different theoretical options available for postcolonial studies.