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

Whether this represents a fundamental truism of the novel form is of course debatable, but Banville’s observation offers a useful insight into how the formal structure of artistic texts may in fact represent responses to the “antagonisms of reality” that come to define a historical milieu. Furthermore, it offers an implicit suggestion that the form-versus-content debate is perhaps less meaningful to authors than it may be to those of us who attend to the business of assigning meaning to literary works. The business of critics is to make assertoric claims about texts. The danger of criticism is that sometimes an act of reductionism is made. We have responded to this problem, in this collection, by focusing mainly on individual novels.

We hope that the essays at hand will contribute to a greater specification of difference and commensurability—that they will contribute to our understanding of the range of British (and affiliated) identities and cultural contexts. We believe they will attest to the health of the fiction marshalled under the rubric British Asian, including its range of thematic and cognitive foci as well as formal and stylistic affiliations. Against conventional practice, we stretch the term to include writers and works that have a West Asian or East Asian focus, whereas the traditional practice is to limit it to writers with a South Asian background. We do this not because we claim to unearth anything like a knowable community, but because we believe it will help us learn about extant, differently configured sensibilities—given that nonstatist forces working below and above the nation have instituted a proliferation of contact zones, so that in actuality, the points of overlap between European and Eastern cultures nowadays take many forms, even as the categories themselves undergo change. We believe that our expanded use of British Asian will allow access to new structures of feeling emerging as a consequence of and in tandem with Britain’s (necessary) entry into a postimperial milieu, one that is increasingly globalist in scope and aspiration. Our boundaries are intended to signal inclusiveness rather than prohibition.