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

In response to the dominance exerted by scientistic discourse, Mallot considers the significance of what he calls “postcolonial thermodynamic[s]” operating in the novel. He studies how the latter crashes and merges with the former.

In some quarters, it has become an axiom of literary discussion that much of contemporary British writing is concerned with or revolves around “issues of historical meaning”.⁵ For various reasons, writers have sought to trace the fissures and linkages between personal and public memory, to write “history from below” and to wrestle with issues of historical variance and veracity—with meanings occluded or fostered by dominant narratives. In her discussion of A. Sivanandan’s When Memory Dies (1997), Sharanya Jayawickrama argues that history embedded in narrative is itself counterhegemonic, and that Sivanandan’s achievement lies in his rejection of primordialism. Sivanandan mourns the loss of collective memory through a narrative that resurrects, against the grain of the current imbroglio, moments of affiliation across ethnic lines. Ultimately, memory uncovers a sense of history as processual and fungible rather than as an “inexorable occurrence”. A similar spirit animates Reed Dasenbrock’s essay on the fiction of Tariq Ali. Ali’s ambition is to trace, in a multivolume historical novel, the growth of Islamic civilisation and centuries of interaction between East and West, between Islam and Christianity. Four instalments of this planned “Islam Quintet” have been published to date.⁶ Dasenbrock shows in his discussion how Ali displaces our “received fault lines”, how he challenges the misrecognitions and resurgent Orientalism that arguably dominates public discussion on this issue.

As might be expected, several of our contributors discuss works that explore the dynamics of multiethnic belonging and affiliation in Britain. They look at texts that crafted that exciting, inaugural moment when non-European contours were first added to the literary map of postwar British fiction, as well as more recent ones that chase thematic and formal opportunities opened by these forebears. In different ways, these works participate in an elaboration of “new ethnicities”,⁷ in an ongoing recasting of national identity that has exercised the imagination of writers and theorists in recent years.⁸