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

One of them exemplifies the dangers of a romanticist position that idealises nativism, or the negative utopian dream that the past is recoverable in all its former plenitude. More sobering in the light of contemporary developments, Feroza Jussawalla provides a broad-brush survey of Hanif Kureishi’s writing and points out that the social alienation experienced by Asian youths has been a focus of his work for some twenty-odd years. For Jussawalla, a theoretical insistence on groundlessness exacerbates a situation where individuals turn to primordial discourses and “definite notions of identity” because of an “inability to belong anywhere”.