Orientations: the positions and aesthetics of contemporary migrant fiction

Abstract

Touching on the work of David Dabydeen, Caryl Phillips, Fred D’Aguiar, Jamaica Kincaid, Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie and Hanif Kureishi I will examine, in this thesis, the political, aesthetic and historical orientation of contemporary migrant writing. This thesis argues that the contemporary migrant writer is an impassioned historian and theorist of the contemporary whose fiction attempts to rescue migrant history from the disorientating, de-historicised blur of a post-imperial present. The fictions of these South Asian and Caribbean writers will be read essentially as orientating fictions that attempt to re-orientate the post-imperial present historically, fictions that attempt to place the contemporary literary migrant on a historical map that explodes out o f and reflects on the colonial These fictions also read against the grand narrative of Western history by reading the migrant, not as a figure who evolved out of the originary ideology of national belonging but as a figure whose ancestry is founded on a history of displacement and migrant passage. In this thesis I aim to demonstrate how these writers read the migrant as a transitory, transformed figure by historicising, in their fictions, the transition from native to migrant, and by identifying and voicing post-imperial continuities and discontinuities in the contemporary. In this way, I will contend, these writers simultaneously reclaim a migrant history and define their contemporary migrant position in the postimperium.