A collision of the epic with the banal: British Asian constructions of home.

摘要

My dissertation, "A Collision of the Epic with the Banal: British Asian Constructions of Home," examines constructions of home and diaspora in a selection of contemporary British Asian texts. These popular cultural texts, including novels by Hanif Kureishi, Atima Srivastava and Meera Syal, and films like My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), tap into British traditions of subcultural resistance to create an ironic version of home. The local street or neighborhood becomes the site in which the drama of national belonging is imagined. Drawing on Michel de Certeau and key figures in British Cultural Studies like Dick Hebdige, I examine how the aesthetic potential of everyday practices is seized on to foreground the inherent instability of home and nationality. However, this ironic stance is challenged by the figure of the Islamic fundamentalist, the "home-grown" bomber, appearing in, for instance, Kureishi's novel The Black Album (1995) and a wealth of media representations. This figure throws into relief the contradictions of a contemporary postcolonial European country like Britain. Such contradictions are further explored through a reading of British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom's In This World (2004), which highlights the widely different meanings that international mobility carries for the "illegal" migrant as opposed to a citizen of an EU country, a privileged location in an increasingly globalized world. The dissertation examines, in effect, the ambiguities that arise when British Asian constructions of home are confronted with the fundamentalist's violent defense of essentialized notions of religion and culture---and with the globalized market economy's enforced nomadism.