Françoise Král - Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature-Palgrave Macmillan (2009)

Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone
Diasporic Literature
Also By Françoise Král
RE-PRESENTING OTHERNESS: Mapping the Colonial ‘Self’/Mapping the

Indigenous ‘Other’ in the Literatures of Australia and New Zealand (editor)
Critical Identities in
Contemporary Anglophone
Diasporic Literature
Françoise Král
Senior Lecturer in English
Université Paris 10, Nanterre, France
© Françoise Král 2009
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First published 2009 by
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Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
1. Paradigmatic Shifts and New Orientations in

Diasporic Studies: Mapping the Site of Intervention 11
Liminality as metaperspective 14
The (a)politicalness of liminality 17
Aesthetics and the politics of liminality 20
The diasporic imaginary 23
2. Identity, Interstitiality and Diaspora 26

Identity and interstitiality: postcolonial perspectives 31
Interstitiality in a diasporic perspective 37
The semiotics of interstitiality 42
3. Interstitiality, Authenticity, Postmodernity 50

Rethinking the continuity land/race/language/culture and
the temptation of authenticity in Fruit of the Lemon by
Andrea Levy 57
The melting pot definition in crisis: Mona in
The Promised Land by Gish Jen 63
Double diasporas and identity: The In-Between World of
Vikram Lall by M.G. Vassanji 68
4. Shaky Ground, New Territorialities and

the Diasporic Subject 75
From colonialism to heritage culture: the paradigm of
the snowglobe 79
From the Promised Land to homecoming narratives:
interrogating Western myths and doxa 84
Interrogating postcolonial paradigms 87
Language and new territorialities 92
5. Disjunction, Ethics and the Diasporic Subject 99

Conflicting ethoses: of discontinuities in the
diasporic experience 102
vii
viii Contents
Deterritorialization and the sheer ‘nakedness of

human rights’ 109
Reterritorializing the ethical subject 113
From the ‘local tribe’ to the ‘global tribe’ 119
6. Language(s) and the Diasporic Subject 125

Mother tongue, father tongue and stepmother tongue:
rethinking the genealogy of postcolonial linguistic legacies 131
Of bilingualism and bilanguaging: being at home in
two different languages 136
Of the cultural domination of the English language 149
National languages and transnationalism 157
Notes 161
Bibliography 174
Index 187
Acknowledgements
The research for this book has been supported by a number of institu-
tions. I am particularly grateful for a study leave awarded by the CNU
(the French National Committee of Universities) and a grant awarded
by the SAES (the French Society for English Studies). My research has
also benefited from the time I spent at the University of Texas at Austin
where I taught postcolonial literature. I have also received the support
of the CREA (Centre for Research in English Studies) in my current
department at the Université Paris 10 Nanterre, and in particular of
Wilfrid Rotgé and Emily Eells.
I would like to express my thanks to Claire Bazin, my onetime super-
visor for her support and encouragement.
I am also grateful to the late Michel Fabre, as well as to Gérard Celli
who played such a decisive role, at an early stage, in the direction which
my research projects have taken and whose guidance over the years has
been immensely valuable.
I would like to express my very warm thanks to Meredene Hill,
Crystal Webster, Clare MacManus and Simone Rinzler, for their sup-
port and friendship, to Delphine Reffet who provided a most conveni-
ent writing retreat, as well as to Matthieu Guillot for his patience and
encouragement.
Two people in particular have been especially helpful in seeing this
book through to publication; Jean-Jacques Lecercle who encouraged and
nurtured the first impetus to write and Sam Coombes, who made sure
that the manuscript actually made it out of the drawer. I am grateful
to both of them for their careful rereadings and the rigorous eye which
they have cast over my manuscript. My very warm thanks to Sam for
the gift of patience, time and accuracy.
A special thought goes to wee Juliet who faithfully accompanied me
to the library whilst the maunscript was still in preparation and was
born shortly after its completion.
My deepest thanks go to Geneviève Král for years of unwavering
support.
Some of the material included in Chapter 2 appeared in Philip Roth
Studies whose editors have kindly granted permission to reproduce these
extracts.
ix
x Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editors of the numerous journals in which

articles of mine have been published, and in particular Marc Delrez,
William Hughes, Derek Parker Royal and Janet Wilson.
Many thanks to the staff at the National Library of Scotland for their
efficiency, their warmth and the perseverance with which they have
hunted down books for me on numerous occasions.
Introduction
The chronicles of diasporas – those of the black Atlantic, of the

Metropolitan Jewry, of mass rural displacement – constitute
the ground swell of modernity. These historical testimonies
interrogate and undermine any simple or uncomplicated sense
of origins, traditions and linear movement. Considering the
violent dispersal of people, cultures and lives, we are inevitably
confronted with mixed histories, cultural mingling, composite
languages and creole arts that are central to our history.
(Chambers, 1994, 16–17)
Le monde moderne est hanté par le spectre d’un effacement

des différences.
(Bayart, 1996, 23)
The world is haunted by the spectre of a waning of
differences.
(My translation)
This reflection on identity takes place at a time when identity continues

to occupy centre stage not only in literary and cultural studies but also
in the humanities in general, while being subjected to various critical as
well as contextual assaults. The same situational impact of history and
politics which had propelled issues of national and regional identity to
the forefront of postcolonial studies is now starting to undermine the
pertinence, if not the validity of such categories in diasporic studies,
as new phenomena such as transnationalism, the formation of inter-
national communities and globalism have appeared. Arjun Appadurai
in particular has made a significant breakthrough in intuiting the role
of transnational communities and their impact on identity definition
1
2 Critical Identities
at both an individual and a national level as well as their role in the for-
mation of new models of identification. Conversely, the multiplication
of contact zones and the broad spectrum of situations resulting from
migrations have forced theorists to make room for new categories and
increasingly pay attention to hybridity (Bhabha), mestizaje (Anzaldua),
interstitiality and hyphenation (Mishra).
This contextual shift has been paralleled with a critical reappraisal of
the notion of identity. Not only has the essentialist conception of iden-
tity come under criticism with deconstructionism, the link between
identity and authenticity has also been the object of much speculation
and has been interrogated to such an extent that today, it has become
difficult to apprehend identity independently of identity construction
and the mechanisms it involves; in other words, identity has gradually
come to be apprehended in its artificiality rather than per se.
The turn of the twenty-first century is thus a paradoxical time when
identity still occupies pride of place while being on shaky ground; its
unreconstructed parts continue to haunt the field of literary studies
with the recurrence and perseverance of a spectre to the point where it
almost seems that the more identity is under threat, the more it resur-
faces. The same paradox is mirrored in the diversity of literary produc-
tion. While new voices have emerged, which have become more visible
thanks to the appearance of new labels like Black British literature and
the literature of the South Asian diaspora, to name only two, the genre
of the global novel points in the opposite direction. With its deterrito-
rialized characters who not only roam the world at their ease but who
sometimes seem to have jettisoned all cultural moorings, the global
novel not only offers new models of togetherness and citizenship, it
also reflects an actual change in the way some diasporians negotiate
their double belonging and cope with the de facto in-betweenness of
their condition.
The starting point of this book is an interest in the disjunctive phe-
nomena inherent in the diasporic experience as well as a concern
relating to the fact that the figure of the migrant has been presented
as emblematic of the postmodern, post-industrial condition, a sort of
epiphenomenon and heightened version of the consequences of post-
modernity. Much as it is tempting to subscribe to this correlation, the
canonization of the migrant as an emblematic figure of the twenty-first
century is problematic. Not only does this view constitute a romanti-
cized vision of immigration, one that is far from being representative of
all im/migrants but more clearly associated with those whom Appadurai
(1996) has called the diaspora of hope, it also betrays a certain political
Introduction 3
agenda and impacts on notions such as communities, nations, and the

ethos of the social fabric. Whether it be the celebration of individuality
through a focus on the personal trajectory of migrants, the absence
of political involvement which goes hand in hand with the peripheral
position often occupied by im/migrant figures in the host country,
or the ethical repositioning of the diasporic subject generated by the
forced amnesia of the homeland, all these features of diasporic litera-
ture need to be interrogated, especially when they are co-opted by the
West and presented as the demise of postmodernity or the inevitable
future of contemporary man in an increasingly ‘liquid world’ to take
up the expression used by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman to refer to the
postmodern condition.
This book is concerned with the prismatic value of diasporic literature
which, though problematic when presented as an iconic representation
of postmodernity, is nonetheless a unique vantage point, a privileged
outlook on emerging issues which loom large at the turn of the twenty-
first century. Hence the title of this book which not only implies that
diasporic identities are in a critical position, nor only that they need
to be critically reassessed, but also that they constitute a most valuable
category for both political and epistemological reasons, a theme which
I shall develop in Chapter 1. There is indeed an intrinsic value to lit-
erary representations of these changing and hybrid identities, which
lies in the emphasis they put not so much on analysis and critical
appraisal as on self-representation. Indeed, unlike identity, which can
be approached rather scientifically and quantified in terms of markers
of integration, self-representation, which is acknowledged as an essen-
tial parameter of identity definition, is more subjective and therefore
difficult to grasp. The difficulty is even more acute when one tries to
apprehend it from within the critical apparatus of other disciplines of
the humanities modelled on the exact sciences (like some branches of
sociology which are still trying to break away from the Durkheimian
postulate which consists in dealing with human facts as if they were
things). Literature on the other hand leaves more room for the gram-
mar of identity to express itself in all its complexities, in the jarring
polarities of its fragmented nature, and for the divide between objective
markers of integration and one’s sense of belonging to widen to unex-
pected proportions.
The diverging methodologies of literary studies and sociology or
anthropology can however converge around specific nexuses involving
the pivotal part played by language and myths – whether they be canon-
ical myths or the more popular doxa of our era – in the coming together
of new types of communities. The interest of an anthropologist like Marc

Augé or a sociologist like Zygmunt Bauman in language have inspired
me to engage in a transdisciplinary dialogue. The idea is not so much
to import concepts from sociology and show how they are illustrated in
literary texts. Such an approach would run the risk of instrumentalizing
the literary texts, and potentially reduce them to mere testimonies on
immigration. It consists more in showing how these texts either expli-
citly interrogate or invite us to interrogate the conflicting patterns of
identity constructions and understand issues which are only starting to
emerge and have been left out of existing theoretical paradigms.
Both the scope and the interdisciplinary nature of such an undertak-
ing have forced me to narrow down a very broad field to specific ques-
tions which to me lie at the heart of the diasporic novel and constitute
the specificity of its understanding of identity. In my investigation I
have therefore followed two axes. The first one consists in an investiga-
tion of the new world geography presented in diasporic works and the
redefinition of today’s geopolitical landscape. Indeed, contemporary
texts often mirror the redefinition of the contours of former partner-
ships and zones of influence, as well as point to the underlying logics
of international exchanges. In doing so, they sketch a new world geog-
raphy where the transnational is threatening the local and where new
forms of interaction are starting to take shape.
The second axis touches upon one of the bones of contention today
in geopolitical sciences and certain branches of the humanities which
is the extent to which globalization has affected or is affecting social
practices and national communities through the spread of a world lan-
guage, English. A pessimistic commentator like Hagège (2006) laments
the death of languages, while others study the progress of English as
an international vector of communication but remain attentive to the
changes brought to the language by such an extended use (Crystal, 2003
[1997]). While some argue that linguistic globalization leads to an ero-
sion of the world’s linguistic mosaic, others argue that the English lan-
guage itself is at threat, reduced to an instrument of communication,
severed from its historical context of origin (Lecercle, 2004) and from
a social fabric whose diversity it no longer mirrors or echoes because
of standardization (Glissant). The corpus of diasporic fiction offers a
wealth of situations involving bilingualism or polyglossia and reveals a
whole new series of understudied phenomena inherent in the specifici-
ties of the contemporary diasporic experience and its double belong-
ing, such as disjunctive approaches to the two languages or linguistic
compartmentalization.
Introduction 5
The double focus of this study has led me to adopt a selective

approach to the broad and ever-expanding corpus of contemporary
diasporic literature. In Chapter 1, I shall come back to the definition of
the term diaspora, which is still a controversial term used by some as
a mere metaphor while others remain attached to a strict definition of
the term. The criterion I have used to select my corpus of literary texts is
that these texts by diasporic writers or writers from diasporic traditions
should explicitly engage with issues related to displacement, migra-
tion and relocation and address the issues of imaginary geography or
language. Such a prerequisite, added to the sheer volume of diasporic
texts has led me to leave aside some illustrious authors among whom
V.S. Naipaul, Anita Desai or Amitav Ghosh and include emerging voices
who have not yet been studied in book-length studies such as Monica
Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri or Hari Kunzru. Most of the writers are from three
main diasporic traditions: the south Asian diaspora (represented by
Monica Ali and Jhumpa Lahiri), the Caribbean diaspora (Andrea Levy)
and the African diaspora (Abdulrazak Gurnah). But the focus of my
book has also led me to include other diasporic writers such as Marina
Lewycka or Cristina Garcia.
The very nature of my project implies the adoption of a long-sighted
perspective on the experience of diaspora. The main difficulty and
potential pitfall of such an undertaking is to go one step too far in the
direction of abstraction and somehow overgeneralize rather than the-
orize, to the point of uprooting the texts from their specific context
and related issues. This difficulty goes beyond issues of methodology
and ties in with the way one conceives of diasporic studies. Some crit-
ics like Vijay Mishra consider the history of a diaspora to be fundamen-
tal so as to pre-empt any theorization of diasporas in general. Such a
view of diasporic studies is both very different from that of authors
who have focused on theoretical approaches, while being complemen-
tary. It must be said that projects like mine owe a lot to studies of spe-
cific migrations like Susheila Nasta’s Home Truths: Fictions of the South
Asian Diaspora in Britain (2002), Mark Stein’s Black British Literature:
Novels of Transformation (2004) or Vijay Mishra’s The Literature of the
Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (2007), to name only
a few. But to return to the agenda I have set myself when writing this
book, I have tried to pay particular attention not only to the cultural
or historical context of the diasporic authors discussed but also to
the socio- economic situations and types of migration they are refer-
ring to. Authors of studies on diasporic literature are often reproached
with dealing with migrants as belonging to a homogeneous group and
sometimes of drawing too much on a corpus of texts from an inter-

national middle-class of privileged migrants. It has been a constant
preoccupation in my choice of texts and authors to bear witness as
much as possible not only to the socio-economic diversity of diasporic
voices, but also to the dissonant polyphony which characterizes
Anglophone diasporic literature at the turn of the twenty-first century.
A polyphony which originates not only in the intricate mosaic of its
components as in the complex positioning defined in terms of gender,
social category, cultural background but also in terms of the philoso-
phy of immigration and national identity of the host country which in
my book involves three main English-speaking countries: England, the
United States and Canada.
Chapter 1 serves a double purpose. It recontextualizes the book in the
field of diasporic literature and its criticism and seeks to define the term
diaspora, used in critical literature either as metaphor (Bhabha, Gilroy,
Hall) or in a more rigorous sense, distinguishing between migrants,
refugees and exiles. This chapter also defines the theoretical stakes of
the book and in particular the epistemological interest of the category
of the in-between space of migration as providing a de facto metaper-
spective, that is a double consciousness which is not an essential cat-
egory but an existential one.
In Chapter 2 I discuss the notion of interstitiality (Bhabha, 1996;
Chambers, 1994), its timeliness and its relevance in contemporary dis-
cussions of identity. Although identity is by definition always neces-
sarily interstitial, there is a sense in which the complexity inherent in
identity today is pushed to a radical point by the diversification of iden-
tity definitions in a world whose human geography is constantly rede-
fined by mass migrations. This phenomenon and the epistemological
crisis it has triggered have been rendered more acute by the fact that
the theoretical framework itself is in crisis; indeed, the grand narra-
tive of identity construction is experiencing difficulty recovering from
the assault of deconstructionism. The first two sections of the chap-
ter trace the process of identity reconfiguration in a postcolonial and
in a diasporic context, paying particular attention to individual/col-
lective memory, topography and the mapping of a new identity, and
temporality or the genealogy of the postcolonial/diasporic other. The
last section is centred on issues of semiotics and taxonomy. While the
radical polarities of diasporic lives pose interpretative problems, the kal-
eidoscopic character of immigrants and their multiple positioning in
society invite to question the pertinence of interpretative paradigms
centred on monolithic categories.
Introduction 7
Chapter 3 positions itself in contemporary debates and discusses the

two poles around which debates on identity have crystallized: authen-
ticity versus the postmodern take on identity and critical reassessment
of identity. In the past forty years or so, the notion of authenticity has
come in for harsh criticism. The appearance of a more critical approach
to the issue of authenticity coincided, both chronologically and logic-
ally, with a general reassessment of the question of identity in the wake
of deconstructionism, which posited that identity is not an already
existing category but a construct, generated by and developed through
discourse in collusion with the interests, goals and desires of domin-
ant cultures (Spurr, 1993; Clifford, 1986; Lowe, 1991; Young, 1995). Yet
authenticity has not disappeared altogether, any more than have race or
ethnicity; they have sometimes resurfaced in cultural studies. A prob-
lem with the deconstructionist take on identity is that by dissociating
categories it also empties them of their ontological depth. One of the
consequences of studies focusing on counter-discursive strategies is that
self and other become two poles, two abstract signifiers, interrelated
and interdependent. Instead of being envisaged as mere signifiers, the
self and the other need to be apprehended in their ontological depth, a
depth made of various layers, of an intricate geology. In order to move
away from theoretical abstractions I propose to start from a close ana-
lysis of the genesis of identity in a corpus of texts dealing with second
generation immigrants, who are precisely at the point of juncture or
maybe disjuncture between the national definition of identity in the
host country, the would-be identity fantasized by their parents and their
own room for reinvention (Andrea Levy, Gish Jen and Moyez Vassanji).
Chapter 3 allows me to illustrate the workings of identity formation in
relation to the conceptions of national identity of the host countries
concerned (in particular the difference between assimilationist policies
and the theory of the melting pot).
In Chapter 4 I propose to analyse representations of the world geog-
raphy in contemporary diasporic fiction. Diasporic texts are by their
very nature tales of nostalgia whose function is to re-member the
fragments of the motherland in a situation of either temporary dis-
placement or permanent exile. Yet the fact that diasporic literature is
characterized by a strong emotional charge and a certain nostalgia does
not imply that it is necessarily a deforming lens skewed by subjectivity.
In this chapter I work on the proposition that it can even prove to be a
reliable prism, a sharp lens – though at times a magnifying one. Indeed,
because they have experienced displacement and mobility, but also
the disjunction between a discourse on geographical mobility and the
harsher reality of economic stagnation, immigrants occupy a perfect

locus to assess the validity – or lack of validity – of postmodern myths
relating to space and territoriality, in particular fluidity and mobility
and the belief that the world has become a global village (McLuhan).
My focus is more specifically on discourse and language and on their
various modi operandi. In the first section I propose to analyse how the
representation of the homeland and of the host country are not only
shaped by nostalgia and affected by the haunting presence of the home
country, but are also caught in a convergence of discourses which do not
necessarily clash but rather merge into a pattern of confluence. Hence
the colonial representation of India as exotic and pristine is taken up by
the discourse of heritage culture (Harvey) and rechannelled, producing
a new India tailored for the West. Another pattern is the disjunctive
one which brings into tension myths and narratives of failed integra-
tion. Such texts, among which many homecoming narratives, like that
by Hari Kunzru or Kiran Desai, expose the disjunction and dissonance
between Western discourse and the actual experience of the diasporic
subject. The last section of the chapter, which takes its cue from anthro-
pologist Marc Augé’s analysis of the places of supermodernity, focuses
on the role of language in the reconfiguration of space and the com-
ing together of new communities which do not originate in geographic
continuity and physical proximity.
Chapter 5 addresses one of the underlying themes of the book,
namely an interest in the disjunctive phenomena inherent in the
diasporic experience. I argue that the double belonging (rather than the
in-betweenness) of the diasporic subject generates a disjunctive process
which not only threatens selfhood and identity but also the diasporic
subject as an ethical and political being. Bilingualism, for example,
can create a disjunction between words and their meaning but also
between one’s discourse and its effects in a situation of communica-
tion. This is what is suggested in several passages from Rushdie’s novel
Fury, a position which sharply contrasts with the postmodern style of
earlier works by Rushdie. Rather than playing with language, Rushdie
reasserts the rights and responsibilities of anyone using a language to
use it not only to express himself/herself but also with a certain degree
of social awareness of the potential consequences. This chapter there-
fore seeks to engage with issues linked to ethics and the repositioning
of the diasporic subject, not only as deterritorialized and uprooted, but
as rerooted, ethically and politically. This implies looking at the process
of social reterritorialization and social validation (Emmanuel Renault)
but also at the emergence of the global community of im/migrants as
Introduction 9
a potential political entity (Hardt and Negri). A large part of this chap-
ter draws on the findings of the Frankfurt school (Axel Honneth but
also the second generation with figures like Emmanuel Renault) and
proposes close readings of certain texts, in particular Zadie Smith, in
the light of their ideas. This chapter also engages with the revival of
an interest in the ethics of cosmopolitanism (Appiah, 2007) and dis-
cusses the pertinence of this largely Western concept in relation to the
diasporic subject.
Chapter 6 focuses on the role and representation of languages – more
specifically the mother tongue and English, the language of the host
country. Because immigration often involves a move to a new linguis-
tic context, the role played by language in the experience of immigra-
tion and in the shaping of a new identity is of paramount importance.
Language proficiency is thus the first aspect, both chronologically and
in terms of importance, not only because it plays a key role in the actual
integration of the immigrant, but also because it affects the sense of
belonging he might or might not develop, independently of object-
ive markers of integration. The question of language, bilingualism and
‘bilanguaging’ in English-speaking diasporic populations needs to be
recontextualized on various levels, among which: the way diasporic
subjects relate to both their mother tongue and the language of the host
country; the postcolonial situation and the use of English to write back
at the centre; the current status of English at the turn of the twenty-
first century, and the question of the function and future of national
languages in an increasingly transnational world. In the first section, I
analyse how the redefinition of the balance of power between Britain
and its colonies has affected and is affecting the way diasporic popula-
tions relate to the English language, no longer seen as a tool of domin-
ation. This forces us to rethink the genealogy of linguistic postcolonial
legacies and in particular the status of English as a ‘stepmother tongue’
(Skinner, 1998). This situation is best reflected in the works of female
writers from the south Asian diaspora like Monica Ali or Jhumpa Lahiri
who often suggest the liberating function of the English language as
an instrument of social reinvention which allows women to emanci-
pate themselves from the yoke of patriarchal societies. This change
however does not solve the problem of the incapacity of the English
language to become more than a conveyor of meaning and bear the
burden of the diasporic experience. In the second section, on bilin-
gualism and bilanguaging, I discuss the way the two or more languages
coexist and in particular the de facto compartmentalization which
assigns the mother tongue and English, the adopted language, distinct
functions. The second half of the chapter approaches the issue of the
hybridization and ‘créolisation’ of the English language in a diasporic
context from a radically different perspective from that of postcolonial
studies and examines the changes brought to the English language by
the diffraction of the site of enunciation and the growing number of
non-native speakers of the language but also of people who use it only
in a work context, as is more and more often the case with the devel-
opment of transnationalism and corporate capitalism. While the lat-
ter contribute to what linguists like Jean-Jacques Lecercle have called
the instrumentalization of the English language, diasporic writers no
longer reappropriate and abrogate it, but take an active part in a process
of encyclopaedic cross-fertilization of the language in a manner close to
what Edouard Glissant has referred to as ‘créolisation.’
1
Paradigmatic Shifts and New
Orientations in Diasporic Studies:
Mapping the Site of Intervention
This reflection on identity in diasporic literature takes place at a time of

major mutations and paradigmatic shifts which affect both the object
under scrutiny – diasporic texts – as well as the critical apparatus deal-
ing with it. Any take on diaspora therefore needs to be clearly defined
methodologically and critically but also epistemologically and politic-
ally in relation to the vexed terrain of diasporic studies in order for its
true implications to be revealed.
In recent years it has been argued that the nature of the diasporic
text has changed dramatically, thus reflecting a larger change in the
experience of diasporas at the turn of the twenty-first century. The
genre has supposedly moved away from a certain tragic mode linked
to the experience of diaspora as loss, nostalgia and a longing for the
past, to embrace the more alluring theme of positive immigration
and self-reinvention abroad; in so doing, the diasporic experience has
become increasingly divorced from the notion of exile and closer to
that of residence in a foreign country1 if we are to believe Levi and
Weingrod:
The tone and meaning of ‘diaspora’ are also transformed. According

to the old usage ‘diasporas’ were commonly depicted as melancholy
places of exile and oppression that restricted social and cultural fru-
ition. [...] In sharp contrast, in the current view ‘diasporas’ are enthu-
siastically embraced as arenas for the creative melding of cultures
and the formation of new ‘hybridic’, mixed identities. To be part of
a diaspora is presumably, to be ‘on the cutting edge’ of new cultural
and other formations. (Levi and Weingrod, 2005, 45)
11
One should nonetheless be wary and weary of the fact that this muta-
tion, which seems to have affected the genre as a whole, is partly the
result of a redefinition of the genre’s outlines, or as some would argue a
blurring of its contours, which have been made to embrace, sometimes
quite opportunistically, an ever-increasing body of texts, whether it be
novels written by first or second generation immigrants, or novels by
writers who only have a distant connection to the diasporic experi-
ence. The centripetal inclusion of an ever-growing number of new cat-
egories into the diasporic corpus and of texts which seem to have been
absorbed into a terminological vortex2 pre-empts any serious claim
that the genre as such has dramatically evolved, while reviving the
long-lasting debate of how to define diaspora. The initial issue of how
one defines ‘diaspora’ and of the extent to which the term should be
stretched has always been a bone of some contention and the contro-
versy lies in its etymological ambiguity. When used in the etymological
sense (from the Greek dia meaning ‘through’ and speirein meaning ‘to
scatter’) it can apply to virtually any form of immigration, to any con-
text and runs the risk of becoming an empty shell, a concept devoid of
real pertinence and which may even lead to gross overgeneralizations. 3
Today one can still distinguish between two trends in critical literature
dealing with issues related to diasporic populations, those which use
the term diaspora in a strict sense and distinguish between migrants,
exiles, expatriates, refugees (Cohen, 1971; Safran, 1991; Tölölyan, 1991)
and those who use the term diaspora as a metaphor (Appadurai, 1996;
Bhabha, 1990, 1994 and Hall, 1990).4
This taxonomic divide does not only link up with methodological
issues but with a more profound divergence as to the meaning of dias-
pora and its very nature, as contextual rather than essential, as well as
to its potential paradigmatic nature. The spread of the idea of diaspora
as metaphor, which came to the forefront with theorists like Stuart Hall,
Paul Gilroy (first with There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack and then with
The Black Atlantic) or Homi Bhabha, corresponds both to the decline of
the Jewish or Armenian paradigms of diaspora and their emphasis on
the return journey, as well as to a parallel move from the bipolar model
featuring home country and host country to a tripolar one, which no
longer foregrounds the point of origin or return but the middle ground,
as in Bhabha’s theorization of the third space. In previous models, like
that put forward by Safran in the first issue of Diaspora: A Journal of
Transnational Studies (1991), the experience of diaspora revolves mainly
around the point of origin. Safran tendered the following definition
as a reaction against the framework devised by the Scheffer-led school,
Paradigmatic Shifts and New Orientations 13
which to him lacked specificity and left the term diaspora open to
metaphoric interpretations:
The concept of the diaspora [can] be applied to expatriate minority

communities whose members share several of the following charac-
teristics: 1) they, or their ancestors, have been dispersed from a spe-
cific original ‘center’ to two or more ‘peripheral’, or foreign, regions;
2) they retain a collective memory, vision or myth about their ori-
ginal homeland – its physical location, history and achievements;
3) they believe that they are not – and perhaps cannot be – fully
accepted by their host society and therefore feel partly alienated and
insulated from it; 4) they regard their ancestral homeland as their
true, ideal home and the place to which they or their descendants
would (or should) eventually return – when conditions are appro-
priate; 5) they believe they should collectively, be committed to the
maintenance or restoration of their homeland and to its safety and
prosperity; and 6) they continue to relate, personally or vicariously
to that homeland in one way or another, and their ethnocommunal
consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the exist-
ence of such a relationship. (IX–X)
There is much merit in Gilroy’s or Bhabha’s resistance to the bipolar

model, not only because of their subsequent redeployment of a more
complex cartography of influences which takes account of the liminal
component, nor only because their frameworks depart from Safran’s
dogged focus on identity formation, but also because – and this is par-
ticularly true of Gilroy – his exploration of black culture from the vant-
age point of diaspora interrogates, destabilizes and ultimately debunks
what Sudesh Mishra refers to as ‘the three discrete columns’ (Mishra,
2006, 57), the homeland, the hostland and the ‘ethno-national cluster’,
since Africa ceases to be the one and only referent while Britain is envis-
aged as a fractured category, stratified according to social class.
The move away from the bipolar framework, which in Sudesh
Mishra’s view began in 19965 (the year Brah’s Cartographies of Diaspora
and Radhakrishnan’s Diasporic Mediations were published, alongside
Gayatri Spivak’s article ‘Diasporas old and new: Women in the trans-
national world’) has opened up the path for an exploration of the mid-
dle ground and has somehow rescued diasporic studies from the pitfall
of archaeology and fossilization to reveal its potential for reinvention as
a site of hybridic and metamorphic identity redefinitions. In other dis-
ciplines of the humanities, like in sociology for example, a similar shift
in focus and move away from the polarities to the in-between space has
been the cornerstone of many studies focusing on phenomena linked
to cross-fertilization and the re-encoding of certain cultural practices.6
But, to restrict our scope to the field of literary studies, this move has
paved the way for a better understanding of the condition of liminality,
whether it be on an existential, epistemological or political level.
In the passage by Levi and Weingrod I referred to at the beginning
of this chapter, the diasporic condition is redefined in positive if not
(over) optimistic terms as a privileged vantage point of cutting edge
experience. This view of diaspora, whose supposed iconicity should not
mask the fact that it is mainly applicable to certain categories of privi-
leged diasporians only rather than to the bulk of exiled migrants unable
to return to the homeland, mimics the vibrancy of a certain type of
diasporic condition – envisaged as an interstice brimming with new
possibilities – which constitutes a heightened form of the postmodern
condition. In the following sections I propose to discuss both the epis-
temological and political implications of this reading of diaspora as well
as discuss the a-politicalness of liminality.
Liminality as metaperspective
That liminality should be associated with a certain critical vibrancy and

insight, as in Levi and Weingrod’s heuristic interpretation of diaspora
as ‘arenas for the creative melding of cultures’, ‘ “on the cutting edge”
of new cultural and other formations’ is hardly surprising. Proponents
of the liminal paradigm have not only stressed the dual nature of the
diasporic perspective, but also the dynamic potential of its porosity and
in particular its potential for interaction, exchange and redefinition.
Whether it be Mishra’s idea of the hyphen, which suggests articulation
rather than frozen rigidity or Bhabha’s redefinition of interstitiality as
on-going negotiation, these new models have showed the way towards
an exploration of the diasporic as hermeneutic category.
This position, which has more recently been largely taken up by Avtar
Brah and Radhakrishnan owes a lot to Stuart Hall’s redefinition of in-
betweenness as something not to be experienced in the passive mode,
but as something to be embraced as a more empowering theoretical
positioning.
The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as

a simple, factual ‘past’, since our relation to it, like the child’s rela-
tion to the mother, is always already ‘after the break.’ It is always
constituted through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. Cultural

identities are the point of identification, the unstable points of iden-
tification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history
and culture. Not an essence but a positioning. Hence there is always
a politics of identity, a politics of position, which has no absolute
guarantee in an unproblematic, transcendental law of origin. (Hall,
1990, 226)
The multi-situatedness of diaspora implies a duplication of patterns

of referentialities, whereby a ‘multi-consciousness’ becomes not only
possible but highly probable. Hence Gilroy’s idea of ‘a double conscious-
ness’, an idea which he borrows from W.E.B. Du Bois but which is also
quite close to Radhakrishnan’s definition of diasporic subjectivity as ‘a
mode of interpretative in-betweenness’.7
The advantage of such positioning is not only that it allows the immi-
grant to embrace a metaperspective, but that it also frees the subject
position of its natural correlative, namely subjectivity. What makes dou-
ble subjectivity a useful concept is that it is not a theoretical construct
but a de facto metaperspective rooted in the locus of in-betweenness.
It is not an imaginary category but an existential one which is both a
blessing and a curse – a curse in the sense that the diasporic writer is
doomed to a life of in-betweenness, but a blessing in the sense that s/he
enjoys a double outlook, and this constitutes an ironic reversal of the
initial situation and some sort of revenge for him being a subaltern in
an East/West world picture. As such, it can be argued, in the vein of Levi
and Weingrod’s celebration of the ‘cutting edge’ quality of diaspora,
that the diasporic constitutes a unique locus from which to observe
the predicament of identity construction at the turn of the twenty-first
century, in a context where traditional definitions of identity inherited
from the nation state are being challenged by the ever-growing fluxes of
diasporic populations worldwide, even if theoretical enthusiasm needs
to be balanced up with the politicalness or a-politicalness of liminality
as we shall see in the next section.
But to go back to this double positioning, its hermeneutic potential
is linked to its contextual specificity. Unlike the category of objectivity
which emerged in a specific context (that of the development of the
European sciences in the nineteenth century, alongside imperialism
and international trade), and which has been repeatedly questioned by
recent studies (Imperial Eyes by Marie-Louise Pratt for example8) and in
particular by New Historicism, the double perspective of the diasporic
writer is well and truly free of the determinism of mono-referentiality.
While the sedentary man, rooted in a given culture, is necessarily deter-

mined by one set of pre-existing representations, the diasporic enjoys
a multiplicity of referentialities which impact directly on his outlook
on things. As such the vantage point of diasporic writing proves to
be a key dimension in a new hermeneutics of contemporary issues in
which the gaze of the in-betweener has the potential to transform into
a prism or magnifying glass rather than a deforming lens. It is not my
intention to romanticize the position of the in-betweener nor to over-
look the difficulties – to say the least – of the situation, but rather to
unveil the following paradox: immigrants as in-betweeners may find
themselves better equipped to understand postmodernity than people
whose identity seems less difficult to come to terms with and are up to
what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman considers to be the real challenge
of the twenty-first century. This challenge consists in conceiving of
identity no longer as fixed, but to keep the options open (‘the mod-
ern “problem of identity” is primarily how to construct an identity
and keep it solid and stable, the postmodern “problem of identity” is
primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open’, Bauman,
1996, 38).
At the same time it must be said that while multi-situatedness can
be epistemologically empowering, the politics of liminality are not as
simple as it may seem and the prismatic role of the third space needs to
be balanced up against the risk of a-politicalness to which liminality is
often associated. As for the iconic vision of liminality as emblematic of
the condition of postmodernity, which has become widely popular in
the last decade, it needs to be critically reassessed. One of the most inci-
sive developments against the third space and its depoliticised projec-
tion of liminal subject position is that put forward by Radhakrishnan
in Diasporic Mediations, in which he cautions against ‘the temptation to
read the diaspora as a convenient metaphorical/tropological code for
the unpacking of certain elitist intellectual agendas’ (Radhakrishnan,
1996, 173).
This is where the line needs to be drawn between the potential of the
diasporic – whether it be as hermeneutic category or site of intervention –
and its actual implementation, where its limitations need to be reap-
praised and where any deterministic tendency needs to be toned down.
That the diasporic can act as a site of political interrogation is a fact, as
we shall see in the next section, but its potential needs to be actuated
and is far from being self-generated by the position of liminality.
Indeed, there is even a sense in which the porosity of the diasporic
can generate the opposite of hybridic identities and lead to a resurgence
of bounded identities as critics like Sudesh Mishra are only too aware:
Many diasporists, to their credit, are aware that while the border pro-
motes democratic porosity and fusion, it also facilitates reactionary
identity formations, identifications, dangerous disavowals of other-
ness (the anti-hybrid values of the Muslim patriarch married to an
English woman, as depicted in the film East is East, comes to mind)
and nostalgia for racially pure domains. (Mishra, 2006, 87)
For Sudesh Mishra there is always a risk of reverting to ‘identity as essence’

before embracing ‘identity as conjuncture’ and it is not enough to inhabit
the diasporic locus; there is also a need to embrace the diasporic atti-
tude as a critical posture. Vijay Mishra harbours similar doubts and goes
as far as to say that ‘contrary to idealist formulations about diasporas
as symbolizing the future of nation-state, diasporas are also bastions of
reactionary thinking and fascist rememorations’ (Mishra, 2007, 17) and
‘exemplary as well as reactionary sites of late modernity’ (2).
The (a)politicalness of liminality
Discussing the politicalness or a-politicalness of liminality necessitates

interrogating several received ideas, among which the slightly roman-
tic yet appealing view that margins are always necessarily politically
situated and that their marginality endows them with an almost inane
potential for subversive interrogation and political action. Indeed, it is
tempting to argue in the vein of Mouffe and Laclau that the radicalism
of liminality constitutes a privileged point of access to the truth.
The discourse of radical democracy is no longer the discourse of

the universal; the epistemological niche from which the ‘univer-
sal’ classes and subjects spoke has been eradicated, and it has been
replaced by a polyphony of voices, each of which constructs its own
irreducible ... identity. This point is decisive: there is no radical and
plural democracy without renouncing the discourse of the univer-
sal and its implicit assumption of a privileged point of access to ‘the
truth.’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, 191–2)
Yet the subversive potential of liminality as vantage point does not system-
atically materialize into powerful political agency as Laclau and Mouffe
are only too aware, and in the same way the situatedness of diasporic
margins does not confer them a supplement of political efficacy.
In fact, if we are to judge by recent developments in the field of

diasporic studies, we may even think that so far, the locus of the
diasporic has failed to become the boisterous arena of political
demands one might have expected it would become. Theories of in-
betweenness like Bhabha’s theory of the third space, have come in for
harsh criticism – Bhabha’s concept of hybridity in particular has been
accused of serving the agenda of neo-liberalism. Critics have, more
wrongly than rightly in my view, picked on the fact that the diasporas
in question are part of an international middle-class of privileged im/
migrants. Yet, much as I disagree with such harsh criticism and mis-
leading readings of Bhabha’s, the fact remains that if such criticisms
have been voiced, it may well be that his underlying political agenda
has been insufficiently spelled out.
If we are to look at the larger panorama of postcolonial and diasporic
studies in the last decade, it has been characterized by a waning of
the radical stance, a toning down of the critical voice, and a general
move away from paradigms foregrounding strong confrontational posi-
tionings. If we take the example of the centre and periphery paradigm,
whose validity and timeliness has been widely discussed in the last dec-
ade, it has led some critics to move completely away from paradigms
involving confrontational strategies to the extent of leaving power
struggle out altogether, as if the world had become one big fairyland of
international exchanges (as I shall discuss in later chapters). Such views
of mass migrations and international exchanges fail to provide a valid,
timely and useful framework for understanding political mutations and
reconfigurations at the turn of the twenty-first century and one of the
issues at stake in the current state of diasporic studies is the resuscita-
tion of a strong political agenda in particular by reinscribing the con-
frontational component.
There is more than one reason why the diasporic may fail to fulfil the
promising agenda some, including myself, like to think possible.
One of them is the gradual complexification of the larger map of
diasporic exchanges, which has not only become more elaborate but is
plagued by constant shifts and redefinitions which undoubtedly make
it more difficult to read the whole picture. The spread of transnation-
alism and the redefinition of the geopolitical landscape as well as a
change in the balance of power between colonizing nations and their
former colonies have not made the process any easier. On the contrary,
as power struggles have not disappeared but have mutated and taken
on new forms, sometimes becoming less visible or at least more difficult
to apprehend, it has become easy to mistake what Hannerz calls ‘the
organization of diversity’ for a ‘replication of uniformity.’
There is now a world culture, but we had better make sure that we
understand what this means. It is marked by an organisation of
diversity rather than by a replication of uniformity. No total hom-
ogenisation of systems of meaning and expression has occurred, nor
does it appear that there will be one any time soon. But the world has
become one network of social relationships, and between its differ-
ent regions there is a flow of meanings as well as people and goods.
(Hannerz, 1990, 237)
Another difficulty lies in the multi-directionality of migratory fluxes

and the criss-crossing of several types of networks, on both a vertical
and a lateral plane. I am referring here to Tambiah’s analysis of trans-
national movements, and in particular the criss-crossing of ‘vertical
networks’ and ‘lateral networks’ (for him there are two levels of lateral
networks, one which aims at extending relationships with communi-
ties of origin, and another which ‘maps the networking that transcends
the borders of both the countries and states of origin and resettlement’,
Tambiah, 2000, 170).
As a result it has become easy to lose track of the ‘oppositional cut that
interrupts the tidal flow of supplementarity’ as Sudesh Mishra elegantly
puts it in his critique of Avtar Brah’s Cartography of Diaspora (Mishra,
2006, 189). Sudesh Mishra remarks that unlike Hall, Brah fails to take
the disequilibrium of power relations into account. Mishra goes on to
notice about the following passage that ‘the second part of the excerpt
negates the perspicacity of the first’:
A multi-axial performative conception of power highlights the ways

in which a group constituted as a ‘minority’ along one dimension
of differentiation may be constructed as a ‘majority’ along another.
And since all these markers of ‘difference’ represent articulating and
performative facets of power, the ‘fixing’ of collectivities along any
singular axis is called seriously into question. (Brah, 1996, 189)
What is really at stake in Mishra’s critique of Avtar Brah’s analysis (at

least on this particular point) is the sense that she has failed to identify
the game of social redistribution in the transfer from one hierarchy to
another, and that this failure betrays a lack of understanding of the
balance of power between the different poles of the global map. This is
indeed one of the difficulties of paradigms dealing with transnationalism
and transnational communities as I argue in Chapter 4 in relation to

Arjun Appadurai’s scapes, in the sense that such global frameworks
often lose track of agency, directionality and the location of inputs and
outputs.
But it seems to me that the real difficulty is not so much the complex
exegesis of an ever-changing map of diasporas, as a more general prob-
lem which has to do with the depoliticization of postcolonial studies,
and maybe of literary studies in general. The depoliticization of the
postcolonial field has been commented upon by Terry Eagleton and
linked to the larger problem of the erosion of the concept of nation.
There is much merit in Eagleton’s analysis for it sees beyond the logical
erosion of the concept of nation as a result of the spread of transnation-
alism, to denounce the complicity of theorists or at least their failure to
see that the current emphasis on categories such as ethnicity has had
serious political consequences. In his view, the postcolonial has dissoci-
ated itself from a discourse based on the nation and has embraced the
more alluring and open field of cosmopolitanism. But by doing so, it
has dropped the notion of class and has subsequently become depoliti-
cized. This has had serious consequences at a time when globalization
has become more predatory.9
This concern for the revival of the political agenda of diasporic studies
has led me to adopt a critical view of transnationalism and reintroduce
categories which some would all too easily consider as outdated, such as
those of class or nation. It also explains why, from a purely methodo-
logical point of view, the literary analyses of this book foreground not
so much the historical and cultural backgrounds of the various texts,
as the material contexts in which the experience of diaspora is under-
taken, in an attempt not only to sketch a mosaic of cultural diversity
but also to give a forum to a jarring polyphony of conflicting voices.10
Aesthetics and the politics of liminality
Advocating the importance of a politics of liminality requires that one

specifies how one conceives of the diasporic text and how one positions
oneself in relation to its politics, but also ultimately how one envisages
the role and status – if any – of aesthetics. This question has been abun-
dantly discussed in relation to postcolonial texts, and in recent years
the debates have often revolved around the pressure sometimes felt by
postcolonial writers to engage with political issues and to write about
their experience as postcolonial writers. This has led to heated debates,
some arguing that aesthetics is not a valid category when it comes to
dealing with postcolonial texts, for it implies a conception of art for

art’s sake and consequently a projection of Western categories onto the
postcolonial text, whereas others have argued that the expectation that
postcolonial writers should privilege form over content was a conde-
scending gesture leading to a de facto exclusion of postcolonial writers
from formalist concerns.
Rosemary Marangoly George’s discussion of these issues in her book
The Politics of Home provides some interesting examples of a ghettoiza-
tion which has often resulted from an emphasis on the political at the
expense of aesthetics, and from a failure to see that aesthetics is never
about aesthetics alone but also about politics and the inclusion or exclu-
sion of postcolonial writers into the canon. George gives the example of
South African writer Agnes Sam, who writes of the difficulty of getting
her experimental novel What Passing Bells published in the West:
The original draft was impressionistic, its form suggestive of a

fractured society, of people in an apartheid system isolated from
each other. It combined poetry with prose. Its purpose was to
frustrate the reader’s need for continuity because this is precisely
how we are frustrated in our understanding of the South African
situation. I’ve seen other works published which are experimen-
tal and this reinforces my view that it isn’t simply that publishers
determine what is acceptable for some prescribed market, but they
have a stereotype of how one should write if belonging to a spe-
cific group. One publisher’s representative asserted very firmly that
Black women write autobiographically. A black woman experiment-
ing with language and form has no business writing. In the new
Commonwealth, those writers who do not conform to these stere-
otypes are said to have been influenced by Western tradition, to
have had an ‘English’ as opposed to a ‘Bantu’ or ‘Third World’ edu-
cation, or they are said not to be writing for the ‘people’[...] But the
crunch comes when we disregard Western tradition and publishers’
stereotypes, and attempt to experiment – this isn’t tolerated. (Sam
in Petersen and Rutherford, 1986, 92–6)
Another aspect of this ghettoization of the postcolonial text is the-

matic ghettoization. Interestingly, it is based on Western representa-
tions of what postcolonial writers are interested in, which is a form
of dispossession of those writers’ autonomous choice with respect to
aesthetic matters. Not only does this prejudice linger, it continues to
exert a certain determinism upon the production of literary texts by
forcing writers to conform in order to fit into the mould. In a recent

panel discussion with three Indian writers, a revealing anecdote was
recited by one of the speakers, Githa Hariharan11. Hariharan remarked
that one of her novels was initially rejected by a publishing house on
the grounds that although her book was interesting and dealt with
issues like otherness, her ‘other’ was not an ‘identifiable other.’ In other
words, as a woman of Asian origin, she was expected to write about her
difficulties as a young Asian in the West. This anecdote, which clearly
highlights the danger of ghettoizing postcolonial writers itself consti-
tutes a plea in favour of equal rights to creativity and poetic licence for
postcolonial and non-postcolonial writers alike, for diasporic ones and
non-diasporic ones and is probably more eloquent than any further
comment I might make.12
The final and maybe least apparent form of underlying racism in
postcolonial or diasporic critique has to do with the resurgence of the
notion of authenticity and its instrumentalization. In recent years, a
growing divide has appeared amongst writers from South Asia, in par-
ticular between those who have remained in their home countries, and
those who have migrated. This divide has become difficult to ignore.
Two of the most well known figures, Salman Rushdie and Arundhati
Roy have often been reproached with not being Indian enough and with
writing books tailored for the West; Rushdie himself has often been said
to be out of touch with India. The antagonism between Rushdie and
those who reproach him with his lack of authenticity points to a key
problem: the survival of authenticity as a criterion to assess the work
of a writer. Of course, one could argue that because this criticism of
Rushdie was originally voiced by Indian writers, the argument should
be settled in favour of the advocates of ‘authentic Indian voices.’ This
solution would have the advantage of solving the problem of the crit-
ic’s Eurocentric perspective and of his potentially biased view. Another
way of looking at this dilemma, which has also become a theoretical
quagmire, is to question the persistence or rather revival of the category
of the authentic which is not only an emanation of the writers’ own
wishes but also meets the requirements of the market and of an ever-
growing readership eager to read exotic tales of authentic cultures. The
collusion between the two is precisely what needs to be interrogated
(Huggan, 2001).
The approach I propose to adopt in this book therefore foregrounds
the form and the aesthetics of the diasporic text, not in the interest of
any sort of aesthetic purism but for political reasons which lie in the
defence of the inclusion of such writers into the canon.
The diasporic imaginary
An important feature of the diasporic novel, and one which I have

chosen to emphasize in this book, is the role and place of the imagin-
ary. It could sound like a truism to say that the imaginary is central to
the diasporic text, since nostalgia and the sense of loss immediately
come to mind when one thinks of the diasporic experience; yet the
imaginary itself is a broad enough notion to lend itself to multiple inter-
pretations and therefore needs to be clearly defined.
In recent years and in the wake of Salman Rushdie’s book Imaginary
Homelands, it has become associated with the cognitive gap which forms
between the homeland and the diasporic subject after the break and
which the subject tries to bridge by resorting to his imagination.13
Recent studies and in particular Vijay Mishra’s Theorizing the Diasporic
Imaginary: Literature of the Indian Diaspora, draw largely on the notion
of the imaginary. Yet the implications of the term cut two ways. Vijay
Mishra’s use of the term ‘to refer to any ethnic enclave in a nation-state
that defines itself, consciously, unconsciously or through self-evident
or implied political coercion, as a group that lives in displacement’ is
owing to the Lacanian idea of stage of the mirror of the ego as well as
to the sense in which Žižek uses it, the imaginary being ‘the state of
identification with the image representing “what we would like to be” ’
(Žižek, 1989, 105). As such the imaginary can be construed as offer-
ing room for reinvention and fabulation, which would have a direct
impact on the reading of diasporic texts as necessarily warped testi-
monies and deforming lenses on the diasporic experience. But there is
also an intrinsic cognitive quality in the very looseness of the imagin-
ary and a certain adequacy which Rushdie had already anticipated, and
which has to do with its suitability to apprehend the specificity of the
diasporic experience. For Rushdie, rather than distort reality and act as
a deforming lens, the distance introduced between the writer and the
imaginary homeland he is trying to recreate in his or her prose makes
the recreation both more vivid and sometimes more pertinent. In the
same way that standing too close to something prevents one from gain-
ing an understanding of the whole picture, and can blur the more gen-
eral design, being too close to the homeland sometimes impairs a more
in-depth and accurate knowledge which can only be gained when a
certain distance between the observer and the object of his observation
is maintained.
It can also be argued, and this is the line of argumentation I propose to
follow, that the imaginary provides a privileged access to the ill-defined
and hard to grasp frontier between identity and self-representation and

as such constitutes a valuable hermeneutic tool. This dichotomy has
been theorized by sociologists to distinguish between objective param-
eters defining an individual’s identity (such as his/her ethnic group,
age, sex, level of education, socio-economic background, etc.) and his/
her self-representation of his identity, which often differs from the way
the subject himself would define his identity and level of integration.14
This dichotomy touches upon one of the key problematics of identity-
related issues. What I propose to argue is that this specificity is also
what makes the stance of the diasporic writer with respect to questions
of identity incredibly rich and complex. Rather than being caught in
the strictures of a given discipline, the genre of the diasporic novel pro-
vides room for expression of this diasporic imaginary and is best appre-
hended precisely because literature deals with representations but does
not seek either to quantify or rationalize them.
Moreover, these representations of diasporic experiences do not have
to fit into pre-existing, mutually exclusive categories but can afford to be
less clear-cut, to straddle divides and thus testify to an in-betweenness
which would never find its way through the questionnaires devised for
a census or for certain types of sociological studies. A second argument
is that while the categories available on a questionnaire are invented
by the author of the questionnaire himself, and are not only moulded
by his own pre-conceived view on the subject but also influence the
respondent, the diasporic take offers a unique approach, one that is not
determined by predefined categories. Indeed, without venturing too far
into these issues one can even suspect that some unconscious longing
for normalcy may even drive the respondent to tick the box correspond-
ing to what he thinks the good migrant would tick. Last but not least,
the imaginary links up with the idea of the unconscious, and this is pre-
cisely why literature is such a valuable entry point into issues of identity
in a diasporic context. When exploring certain areas of the diasporic
experience, a writer seldom aims at comprehensiveness. On the contrary,
the writer foregrounds certain aspects, sometimes blowing them out of
proportion, sometimes minimizing them, but this warped perspective
draws our attention to issues which otherwise would have remained hid-
den. The role and position of this concept is all the more important as
it has a specific resonance in the current context and at a time when
certain disciplines of the humanities are tempted to imitate the meth-
odology of the exact sciences and go in the direction of more formal-
ism and scientificity. The imaginary is par excellence a notion which
shows the limits of the Durkheimian postulate that advocates the study
of social facts as if they were things, when it comes to identity-related

issues and shows all the pertinence and insight of Clifford Geertz’s influ-
ential statement that the experience of understanding other cultures
is ‘more like grasping a proverb, catching an illusion, seeing a joke [...]
than it is like achieving communion’ (Geertz, 1983, 70). Geertz’s state-
ment dismisses the very idea of exhaustivity and defines understand-
ing a foreign culture as the identification of areas of difference, where
the idiosyncrasy of a culture expresses itself, at the point of disjunction
with other cultures. It is precisely when a culture cannot be compared
to others, when its singularity and difference asserts themselves more
powerfully than the similarities with our own culture that we are on to
something, that we start to grasp cultural differences, not the essence
but the actual existence of cultural diversity.
2
Identity, Interstitiality and
Diaspora
There is a sense in which the current interest in questions of identity

and in particular interstitial identities, though timely, has been blown
out of proportion, or rather has become somewhat pleonastic since
identity is by definition always necessarily interstitial. This paradox
originates in the very etymology of the term ‘identity’ which, as Paul
Ricoeur pointed out, refers to both the constitutive kaleidoscopic char-
acter of identity (the fact that something is ‘one’ as opposed to multiple)
and to its transience and mutability (Ricoeur, 1990, 12–13). The very
capacities in which one is defined on various levels, or within vari-
ous circles such as family structure, local life, the workplace, and the
nation, make one necessarily multiple and not fully congruent with
only one identity definition. As for the notion of sameness, it is chal-
lenged by the contextual transience of situations and categories. From
which it results that identity cannot be anything but interstitial, in the
sense of not being fully aligned with abstract definitions with which it
is bound to clash.
However, the complexity inherent in identity today is somehow
pushed to a radical point by the diversification of identity definitions
in a world whose human geography is constantly redefined by mass
migrations, which have an impact on definitions of national identity
within nation states, not to mention the fact that the nation state as
a valid category is itself increasingly challenged by transnationalism
and the development of other forms of group identity like the commu-
nities of sentiment or the new forms of imagined communities which
transgress the borders of national states (Appadurai, 1996).1 The ever-
changing contours of human geography are a constant reminder of the
fluidity of identity definitions, of their inadequacy; they are always
either too rigid or too monolithic and unable to keep pace with the
26
Identity, Interstitiality and Diaspora 27
complex patterns of reconfiguration of human geography. If there is a

certain timeliness of the issue of interstitiality, it therefore lies in our
capacity today, to interrogate the validity and adequacy of existing def-
initions of identity – inherited from the nation state – and to stress its
artificiality.
Despite the revival of the notion of authenticity in certain fields of
study, as a notion which seems to have been salvaged from the rad-
ical reassessment which started with deconstructionism, and which I
shall discuss in the next chapter, there is a general consensus in the
humanities about the need to foster debate regarding the rhetoric of
nation building and to expose the artificiality of the idea of the nation,
whether it be by exposing the rhetoric of its discourse or by spelling out
the tension between the recourse to natural metaphors and the compos-
ite nature of nations. In Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Race, Culture,
Robert Young points out the symptomatic nature of such recourse to
natural metaphors which to him aims at covering up a prevailing sense
of fragmentation:
The need for organic metaphors of identity or society implies a coun-

ter-sense of fragmentation and dispersion. There is a story behind the
way in which the organic paradigm so beloved of the nineteenth cen-
tury quickly developed alongside one of hybridity, of forcing incom-
patible entities to grow together (or not). (Young, 2002 [1995] 4)
In the same book, Young traces the historical development of notions

like culture and race, and debunks the widespread idea of the past pur-
ity of nations as opposed to the hybridity of postmodern times. The
notion of hybridity, which Young recontextualizes in a historical per-
spective – paying particular attention to the role it was made to play in
nineteenth-century debates on the unity of the human race2 – points
to the link between identity and self-representation and the fact that
some cultures decide to either stress their heterogeneity or on the con-
trary their sameness as a political statement and in reaction to other
countries’ definitions of their national identity. Young reminds us that
in Defoe’s time, hybridity was then already claimed as one of the key
features of Englishness and that this emphasis on hybridity was back
in fashion in the nineteenth century and in reaction to the Germans’
definition of themselves as pure Teutons:
Whether merged or fused, the English did not transform themselves

so easily into the imagined community of a homogeneous national
identity. In fact, it became increasingly common in the later nine-

teenth century for the English to invoke Defoe’s account of ‘that
Het’rogeneous Thing, An Englishman’, and to define themselves as
hybrid or ‘Mongrel half-bred Race’, often, after the unification of
Germany in 1871, in a spirit of oppositional rivalry to the Germans,
who regarded themselves as pure Teutons. (Young, 2002 [1995] 17)
The critical reassessment of the workings of identity formation in

the last two decades and in particular that of group identity not only
exposed the artificiality of identity and questioned its authenticity; it
also established the fact that identity originates in a statement; it is not
self-evident and does not pre-exist individuals but comes into existence
in/through discourse and as such requires a grand narrative to sustain
itself. The question which is prompted by this theoretical shift is thus:
how can it survive the postmodern examination and general reassess-
ment of key notions into the twenty-first century? As a consequence, it
seems to me that if the turn of the twenty-first century is such an apt
moment to interrogate the notion of identity, it is not so only because
the contours of human geography are changing at an unprecedented
speed and that these changes are known to the rest of the world thanks
to modern communication technologies; it is also because the theor-
etical framework itself is in crisis and the grand narrative of identity
construction has difficulty recovering from the assault of deconstruc-
tionism, which has left cracks in the epistemological framework.
Our conception of identity at the turn of the twenty-first century has
developed in the wake of three main moves: the rise of the individual
in the nineteenth century, the subsequent end of this long-standing
tradition of identity seen in an essentialist perspective and the devel-
opment of identity politics in the twentieth century, which some have
interpreted as the expression of ‘some misplaced nostalgia for whole-
ness,’ as Denise Riley argues (Riley, 2000, 8) in the sense that people
often turn to ‘collectivised personal identities’ (Riley, 2000, 8). Today,
the conception of identity is somehow caught in a double bind. We
would like to believe that man is no longer a cog in a machine or a
slot in the beehive as the Elizabethans used to say. We like to think
that s/he is an individual – a being gifted with specificities of his/her
own – encouraged to develop them and assert their distinctness, like
the archetypal hero of the nineteenth century Bildungsroman who
undergoes an identity crisis and wanders away from the family unit to
develop his skills and fulfil his personal ambitions before returning and
serving the community. But at the same time, this optimistic vision of
identity, as the legitimate object of a quest undertaken by the individ-

ual has come under strong criticism from many schools of philosophy,
among which phenomenology, which criticized the essentialist stance
inherent in the idea of the ‘I’ as a monad, detached from the rest of the
world and untouched by it.
The redefinition of identity which started with phenomenology and
culminated with postmodernism crystallized around two main issues,
the first being the articulation of individual identity and group iden-
tity. The determinism exerted by the latter over the former was clearly
spelled out by Merleau-Ponty who wrote that ‘nothing determines me
from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but on the contrary
because I am, from the start outside myself and open to the world’
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 434) thereby reasserting the primacy of the
group and its determinism on the individual, while doing away with
the notion of the solipsistic ‘I’. Indeed, self-representation is always pre-
ceded by presentation, the presentation by society of a given identity
which the citizen may want to amend, reject or condone, depending on
his aspirations, and depending also on the political context in which
he lives (in the sense that it is always easier to exert one’s free-will in a
democracy rather than in a dictatorship). The etymology of both iden-
tity and identification provides an insightful entry point into the logics
at work in the relation between groups and individuals – and in particu-
lar the instrumentalization of identity in the context of identification
of individuals by the state – as Denise Riley remarks in Words of Selves.
The second counter-argument to the essentialist definition of iden-
tity has to do with its transience, which originates both in temporality
as an overarching framework and in the temporality of discourse (the
fact that identity is tied to the temporality of discourse and its shifting
signifiers). In Am I that Name?, Denise Riley insists on the contextual
nature of categories which define and label individuals,3 as well as the
fact that they can choose to foreground certain aspects of their person-
ality according to context:
The impermanence of collective identities in general is a pressing

problem for any emancipating movement which launches itself on
the appeal to solidarity, to the common cause of a new group being,
or an ignored group identity. This will afflict racial, national, occu-
pational, class, religious, and other consolidations. While you might
choose to take on being a disabled person or a lesbian, for instance,
as a political position, you might not elect to make a politics out of
other designations. As you do not live your life fully defined as a shop
assistant, nor do you as a Greek Cypriot, for example, and you can
always refute such identifications in the name of another description
which, because it is more individuated, may ring more truthfully to
you. Or most commonly, you will skate across the several identities
which will take your weight, relying on the most useful for your
purposes of the moment; like Hanif Kureishi’s suave character in the
film My Beautiful Launderette, who says impatiently, ‘I’m a profes-
sional businessman, not a professional Pakistani.’ (Riley, 2000, 16)
Riley’s analysis of the complex dynamics of identity definition and the

strategies underlying certain choices made by individuals on a personal
level is particularly valuable when it comes to analysing the complex
paradigms which underlie the redefinitions of power struggle within
multicultural communities. Not only does it offer a pertinent alter-
native to existing polarities such as inside/outside, minority/majority,
home country/host country, it takes account of the complex tectonics of
identity definition and the relabelling of disenfranchised minorities as
they are absorbed into the magma of mainstream culture and cease to
be conspicuous as minorities, a phenomenon which has been described
most eloquently by Philip Roth. In an interview published in Reading
Philip Roth, a collection of essays edited by Milbauer and Watson, Roth
expressed his awareness of the change in the status and image of Jews in
American society and commented on the fact that they were now less
conspicuous than in the days when he started writing:
American Jews are less intimidated by Gentiles than they were when
I began publishing in 1950s, they are more sophisticated about anti-
Semitism and its causes, and altogether less hedged-in by suffocat-
ing concepts of normalcy. This isn’t because they have been socially
blinded by the illusory gains of assimilation, but because they are
not so preoccupied as they once were with the problematical nature
of assimilation, and are justifiably less troubled by ethnic dispar-
ities in the new American society of the last fifteen years – a society
created by a massive influx of over twenty million people far less
assimilable than themselves, about eighty-five per cent of them non-
Europeans, whose visible presence has re-established polygenesis as
a glaring and unalterable fact of our national life. When the cream
of Miami is the Cuban bourgeoisie, and the best students at MIT are
Chinese, and not a candidate can stand before a democratic presi-
dential convention without flashing his racial or ethnic credentials –
when everybody sticks out and doesn’t seem to mind, perhaps Jews
are less likely to worry too much about their sticking out; less likely
in fact to stick out. (Roth in Milbauer and Watson, 1988, 4)
This passage points to the redefinition of the contours of the American

melting pot which comes to include a formerly marginalized group in
mainstream American culture.4 What is interesting is that the signified
referred to has not changed as such; it is the massive arrival of other
ethnic groups into the country which has shifted the boundaries and
made the Jewish community less ‘conspicuous.’
The importance of temporality in playing a pivotal role in the recon-
figuration of both individual and group identity is a crucial parameter,
largely overlooked when the essentialist view of identity still had the
upper hand, but which has come to the forefront of such fields as post-
colonial studies or ethnic studies. So is that of the absence of congru-
ence between group identity and individual identity. Indeed, one of the
specificities of diasporic literature as we shall see is its capacity to pin-
point the zones of disjunction between definitions of identity – which
somehow never seem nuanced enough – and identity definitions as
they are spelled out by countries. Understanding identity, and not only
diasporic identity but also shifting contemporary identities, is there-
fore as much about the zones of congruence between given models and
actual situations as it is about interstices and zones of non-conformity
with existing models. Hence my claim that diasporas constitute a per-
fect vantage point from which to observe the mechanisms at play in
identity formation, self-representation and contextual redefinitions, as
well as the need to discuss the paradigmatic value of diasporic iden-
tities today. In this chapter I propose to look at the way diasporic texts
not only define diasporic identity as interstitial,5 on the margins of
established categories, but also how they pose a more general problem
of semiotics linked to the fact that the interpretative patterns need
to be amended. In other words, my interest in this chapter is not so
much how new definitions of identity have emerged in the post-war
years, which will be my focus in the next chapter, but rather what the
reinventions of identities in the colonial and in the diasporic context
tell us about identity, and how they offer us an insight into contempor-
ary issues of identity.
Identity and interstitiality: postcolonial perspectives
Understanding identity and interstitiality in a diasporic context not

only requires that we understand the workings of identity formation
and definition in general terms; it also necessitates some historical

recontextualization so as to pinpoint the various mechanisms of iden-
tity redefinition which have exerted their influence since postcolonial
times. Rather than sketching a typology of the different ways in which
identity has been redefined in a postcolonial context and contrast it to
the diasporic condition, or trace the reconfiguration of the colonized
self in a diachronic perspective, I have chosen to concentrate on key
stages in the redefinition of the self in a colonial context: memory and
the imposition of a new cultural heritage, topography and the mapping
of a new identity, and temporality or the new genealogy of the post-
colonial other, in order to see how the ‘step-self’6 imposed by the colon-
ist is integrated or fails to be integrated into the diasporic psyche.
The fact that my focus in this chapter is on the continuity and some-
how on the legacies of colonialism and its lingering influence on the
diasporic imaginary also means that from a methodological point of view
I will be dealing with texts by and about first generation immigrants.
In the case of colonized populations, who are literally redefined by
the colonial encounter, colonization results in the imposition of a new
identity, a sort of ‘step-self’ which is created by a reassignment of pre-
vious parameters in three key areas: memory, place and time. As Ng̃ug̃i
Wa Thiong’o wrote in Decolonising The Mind, imperialism is like a ‘cul-
tural bomb’ whose function is to ‘annihilate people’s belief in their
names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of
struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves’
(Wa Thiong’o, 1986, 3). In other words, everything which constitutes
the memory of the individual, ties him to his country and his former
self is erased, as if the colonial mind was reconfigured into a blank slate
wiped clean and written over. The importance of memory as playing
a pivotal part in the reassignment of the postcolonial other was ana-
lysed in detail by Derrida. In his book Monolingualism of the other: or,
The Prosthesis of Origin, in which he summons some of his memories
of colonial Algeria, Derrida describes the way the memory of the colo-
nial child is erased in ‘an amnesia without recourse under the guise of
pathological destructuring’ (Derrida, 1996, 44) and describes the total
loss of bearings of the colonial child as well as the fact that he is forced
to relinquish his memories, his past, his knowledge, in other words the
fundamental components of his identity.
Not a word about Algeria, not a single one concerning its history and
its geography, whereas we could draw the coast of Brittany, and the
Gironde Estuary with our closed eyes. (Derrida, 1996, 44)
The scene which he describes in order to explain the idea of cultural

amnesia, that of a classroom situation, is common to many writers who
have experienced colonialism as one of the most striking memories. Wa
Thiong’o (1986), Memmi (2003 [1957]) and others, all mention mem-
ories of the palimpsestual superimposition7 of the colonist’s culture on
the colonized child. The contours of the new culture, which is forced
upon the child, are not only spelled out in the syntax and grammatical
structures of a new language, or framed by the historical landmarks
of the colonist’s country. They are also mapped in/through the out-
lines of a new country and its geography, which the child has to learn
although he has never been there, a process which generates a form of
symbolic deterritorialization. The destructuring amnesia which Derrida
describes, this willing suspension of memory, is therefore paralleled by
another movement of hypermnesia, as the child has to learn, memorize
and appropriate the whereabouts of the colonist’s country and culture.
The madness of hypermnesia, a supplement of loyalty, a surfeit,

or even excrescence of memory, to commit oneself, at the limit of
the two other possibilities to traces – traces of writing language,
experience – which carry anamnesis beyond the mere reconstruc-
tion of a given heritage, beyond an available past. Beyond any car-
tography, and beyond any knowledge that can be taught. At stake
there is an entirely other anamnesis, and, if one may say so, even an
anamnesis of the entirely other. (Derrida, 1996, 60)
For a child growing up in a colonial context, learning the contours

of a new country does not constitute a mere addition of knowledge; it
forces him to remap his identity and project himself into a new spatial
framework which displaces the polarities home/not home, self/other.
In the last two decades and following the publication of Bachelard’s
The Poetics of Space, humanist geographers have studied the interactions
between space and identity, whether it be individual identity or group
identity and in particular the implications of the representation of a
country on the individual’s psyche (Sopher, 1979; Tuan, 1977).8 This
idea has not only been addressed in a critical perspective but also amply
represented in postcolonial fiction. One of the most eloquent examples
to my knowledge is the reference to Eduard Kremer’s map of Africa in
Nuruddin Farah’s novel Maps:
And did you know that Eduard Kremer, who was the drawer of the
1567 map, introduced numerous distortions, thereby altering our
notion of the world and its size, did you? Africa, in Kremer’s map,
is smaller than Greenland. These maps, which bear in mind the
European’s prejudices, are the maps we used at school when I was
young and, I am afraid to say, are still being reprinted year after year
and used in schools in Africa. Arno Peter’s map, drawn four hun-
dred years later, gives more accurate proportions of the continents:
Europe is smaller, Africa larger. (Farah, 1986, 229)
This example points to the fact that the mapping of a new identity (in the
actual and metaphorical senses of the term) forces the child to redefine
home versus non-home; but it also leads him to reposition his former self
and his nation in relation to the new map of the world imposed by coloni-
alism. This repositioning of the colonized subject therefore takes place on
two levels: the personal level of individual colonial subjects; but also on
that of national identity and the way it is unsettled and destabilized in a
colonial context (even if the second level reflects back on the first one).
This repositioning is not only instantiated by the didactic discourse of
school books but also finds its way into the colonized’s psyche through
the imaginary, and in particular through colonial literature, which
reaches beyond the confines of the classroom and follows the child into
the social sphere of home. The notion of ‘social sphere,’ which I borrow
from Denise Riley,9 proves a useful conceptual tool showing how the
dichotomy home/school, native culture/colonial culture, home edu-
cation/formal education, vernacular languages/English, described by
Ng̃ug̃i Wa Thiong’o in Decolonising the Mind, is not as watertight as it
may seem, but allows for a certain form of permeability between the
two spheres of home and colonial culture.
In The Politics of Home, Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century
Fiction, Rosemary Marangoly George remarks on the function of the
home as part of a politics of self-definition and as instrumental in
articulating group identity. She also analyses how the blending of colo-
nized populations into a crowd without homes and without a topo-
graphical inscription of their presence or individuality can work as a
strategy of desubjectification. In colonial novels such as the incipit of
E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India, the fact that Indians are pre-
sented as part of a mob and as homeless can be seen as biased and
as instrumental in the shaping of an imagery of the native as already
deterritorialized and not fully rooted into the land.
In the colonial text, the ‘native subject’ as manifest in the representa-

tion of the native home is either a ‘lack’ or an ‘excess.’ Hence we are
led to believe that the absence of a ‘self/home’ that resembles the ‘self/
home’ born of western individualism signals the absence of alternative
notions of subjecthood. There are no ‘ordinary’ subjects; just faceless,
outhoused ‘boys’ or excessively bejewelled or painted rajahs and chiefs.
It is significant that the novels written by Indian sub-continentals and
Africans in the postcolonial era, often establish as their protagonist,
the ordinary citizen with his/her sometimes modest, but nevertheless
potent notions of home. (Marangoly George, 1999 [1996] 24)
And of course, the fact that the concept of terra nullius10 played a crucial
part in legitimating the colonization of Australia at the expense of the
indigenous population is an apt reminder of the importance of repre-
sentations of the occupation of the land by the colonizer (Reynolds).11
If memory and territoriality are key elements in the process of cultural
reassignment brought about by colonization, they culminate in the redef-
inition of a lineage and a genealogy which brings about a forced inclusion
of the colonial other. The history of colonialism is replete with episodes
in which the land was renamed and native place names were replaced
by Western names, testifying to the presence of the colonists. Natives
themselves were sometimes renamed, as if renaming them was the first
step towards a conversion to Western values and lifestyle (Goldie, 198912).
This issue has also figured abundantly in literary works. In his 1983 novel
Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World, Colin
Johnson (who later took the name Mudrooroo13) wrote about the first con-
tacts between natives and settlers in Tasmania. One of the key moments
in the novel is the renaming of the natives by Robinson, the missionary
figure inspired from George Augustus Robinson.14 The ceremony, which
is recounted with a good deal of irony satirizes the assimilationist drive of
missionary discourse which culminates in the reinvention of a mythical
genealogy which includes the natives:
He marched his short, plump body to the end of the line and stared
into the face of Wooreddy. ‘You were the first to follow me’, he mur-
mured and then declared: ‘I name you Count Alpha!’
‘Count Alpha, good Commandant Robinson, good’, fawned
Wooreddy. In his numbness he did not care if he was renamed Mister
Brown. (Mudrooroo, 1983, 139)
Mudrooroo tackled this theme in another novel Long Live Sandawara,

in which a group of young urban Aborigines try to reconnect with
their cultural heritage and revive the past by giving themselves the
names of Aboriginal warriors who tried to put up resistance to the
colonists:
I’ve decided that we should drop our white fellow names and have
Nungar names. [...] From now on I’ll be known as Sandawara. I’ve told
you about him and how he fought the white man to a standstill up
north. We’re just like him and his men and women. His struggle is
now our struggle. [...] You Greg, you’ll be called Ellewara. He was a
great man, the one who came before Sandawara. It was him that got
the tracker to take up arms against the invaders. You are like him in
lots of ways. (Mudrooroo, 1987 [1979] 117–18)
What is conceived of as a liberating gesture by the group leader is

presented as rather ambiguous by Mudrooroo who questions not so
much the ‘authenticity’ of this indigenous heritage as its relevance in
the current context. Mudrooroo suggests that it is a deceptive move
which fails to conceal the fact that contemporary identity has not
been erased but combined and renegotiated with elements imported
by colonization. It is impossible to return to indigenous identity as
it existed before colonization. The only thing which is possible is to
negotiate the articulation between the old self and the step-self. When
the indigenous characters of Long Live Sandawara decide to take trad-
itional names, they opt for an identity radically different to their own.
As young people brought up in an urban environment, they slip into
a second skin which has no connection with their own experience
and which is a fantasized representation of a glorious past owing both
to the legends of the oral tradition and to the myths created by the
settlers of Aborigines as unspoilt creatures who lived before history
started. Rather than foregrounding the idea of an authentic identity,
the novel, which questions the validity of the notion of authenticity,
evidences the process of mythological cross-fertilization between col-
onizers, colonists, East and West and the way the myths feed off one
another in a specular perspective.
Putting to one side consideration of the notion of authenticity,
which I am leaving until the next chapter, I would like to examine in
the following section the consequences of the de facto doubleness of
the postcolonial experience which survives into the diasporic jour-
ney. Indeed, as Wa Thiong’o argues in Decolonising the Mind, native
culture survives colonization, which is not so much an erasure as a
superimposition.15
Interstitiality in a diasporic perspective
In this section I propose to concentrate on key moments in the reassign-

ment of the postcolonial self which survive into the diasporic journey
while taking on new meanings. Whether it be through the disruption of
spatial continuity, the awareness of the jarring polarities of im/migrant
life (the former self versus the reinvented self of the im/migrant), or
the interrogation of the authenticity of home(s), diasporic literature
not only revisits key motifs of postcolonial literature which it follows
down the line, several years into the life of im/migrants from former
colonies, but also makes extensive use of the vantage point provided
by the diasporic experience as a metaperspective which brings together
radically opposed contexts and systems of values. Not only does it show
chameleon-like characters or janus-type figures who fit – more or less
easily – into two worlds, it constantly displaces Western discourse from
within and interrogates its categories.
The territorial remapping of identity, which we discussed in relation
to postcolonial literature has its equivalent in diasporic fiction where
it is best embodied by the motif of the journey to the host country,
which introduces spatial discontinuity. This motif has been a leitmotiv
in diasporic fiction, from such seminal texts as George Lamming’s The
Emigrants (1954) or Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956). In recent
years it has been revisited in a creative way by Salman Rushdie, who
has moved away from the realistic mode, to describe the brutality of the
immigrant’s arrival with more surrealist overtones. In The Satanic Verses,
Rushdie imagines the arrival of Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha,
as two men who have miraculously survived a plane crash and landed
in London. Yet if Rushdie describes a series of unlikely events in the sur-
realistic mode characteristic of magic realism, the diasporic journey of
Farishta and Chamcha rings true, as some critics have remarked (Nasta,
2002) in the sense that Rushdie captures the brutality of the process of
uprooting and relocation inherent in the diasporic experience.
Rushdie’s novel, often praised for its daringness and originality, in
particular in terms of form and aesthetics, is thematically rather close
to many contemporary novels which shift the focus from the hardships
of immigration to the immense liberty of immigrants to reinvent their
identity abroad. I am referring more specifically to novels of the dias-
pora of hope and this point cannot be generalized to those of the dias-
pora of terror or despair, like some novels by Abdulrazak Gurnah or A
Distant Shore by Caryl Phillips. Indeed, the corpus of diasporic literature
spans a spectrum of reinventions of identity with radically opposed
connotations and draws on two interpretations of the diasporic experi-

ence which can be traced back to the etymology of the term itself.
As Brian Cheyette reminds us, this etymology suggests the radically
opposed experiences of diaspora as a blessing or as a curse:
The experience of diaspora can be a blessing or a curse, more com-

monly, an uneasy amalgam of the two states. It is not a coincidence
that the Hebrew root for exile or diaspora has two distinct conno-
tations. ‘Golah’ implies residence in a foreign country (where the
migrant is in charge of his or her destiny), whereas ‘Galut’ denotes
a tragic sense of displacement (where the migrant is [...] the passive
object of an impersonal history). (Cheyette, 1996, 295)
In the following discussion I will examine the motif of the journey

away from home and the spatial discontinuity it involves in relation
to a less known text which pushes the reinvention of the self to a radi-
cal point, Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex. This text does not deal
with the journey of immigrants from formerly colonized nations, but
is set in a politically disturbed context, that of a borderland territory
between Greece and Turkey, which is marked by the competing influ-
ences of the two rival nations. The narrative, which chronicles the life
of a family from Greece who decide to emigrate to the US, hinges on the
moment when two of the characters, a young woman and her brother,
seize the opportunity of the long boat journey and of the change of
place to reinvent a new life for themselves, becoming fiancés instead
of brother and sister. Not only do they transgress the taboo of incest,
they also symbolically redefine the genealogy and the imposed lineage.
Immigration, and the change of context it involves, thus provides the
necessary space for reinvention and becomes a key moment as well as
the condition of possibility for a sort of re-birth. The end of the novel
somehow qualifies this radical reinvention of the self since the trans-
gression of the taboo of incest backlashes several generations down the
line when young Callie has to come to terms with a disrupted sexual
identity – she is in fact a hermaphrodite – a feature which in the novel is
explicitly put down to her ancestors’ transgression of the ban on incest.
The theme of reality catching up with the individual’s assertion of his
will-power and freedom to reinvent himself is dealt with in the tragic-
comic mode and with tragic undertones which remind the reader of the
handling of fate in a Greek tragedy.16 This novel, whose plot and writing
venture into the surreal, explores the possibilities of spatial discontinu-
ity and moves away from a description of migration as traumatic to one
which foregrounds the potentialities of the no man’s land of this boat

journey. The in-betweenness of im/migrants, not yet here and yet no
longer there, is an apt metaphor for the gap, the interstice where the
migrant can slip through the net, but where he is also free to reinvent
himself. The novel thus stresses the role of agency in the definition of
identity and the capacity of the self to flee the overlapping pressures
exerted upon identity definition to explore new horizons in the spatial
and metaphorical senses of the term.
In the previous section on postcolonial legacies I have discussed
the fragility of the link which unites the former self to the new
one, the immigrant’s past to his present life. This fragility is a leit-
motiv in contemporary diasporic writing, in particular in novels of
the past decade which envisage im/migration in the light of recent
changes. The improvement in means of transport and communica-
tion have dramatically altered our perception of distances; they have
to a certain extent made im/migration easier, maybe less radical, but
probably also more destabilizing, creating the de facto possibility of
being in between places and in between worlds, of being one day
at the centre of hypermodernity and the next to be locked up in
an Indian house without air conditioning or modern facilities like
the children of first generation immigrants in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel
The Namesake. More importantly, it has allowed the im/migrant not
to sever the cord with the home country, which has had the conse-
quence of challenging the dichotomy home country/host country
even further (Appadurai, 1996).
This new trend in contemporary diasporic fiction which includes
writers like Monica Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri, Hari Kunzru and Kiran Desai
interrogates the lack of substantiality in the diasporic experience. This
reflects on the way diasporic subjects who find themselves in a perman-
ent state of uprootedness are condemned to a de facto deterritorializa-
tion. Some of them even stress the disturbing coming together of two
worlds that have very little in common. The episode of Biju’s telephone
call to his father in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, stresses the
fragility of the link between the two worlds as the telephone cord is
rocked by the birds, as well as the disturbing discrepancy between Biju’s
two lives – his safe though unglamorous environment in the US and
Nepal where violent riots are taking place. Rather than emphasize the
magic of communication or the shrinking of distances in the global vil-
lage, this novel suggests the absurdity at the root of migrant experience,
where radically different contexts are brought into contact in radically
opposed polarities.
This absurdity, which almost makes immigration artificial and dif-

ficult to articulate is suggested in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. With
its emphasis on the glitches of communication (through lost letters and
telephone calls which bring back to life the dormant self in the other
country) The Namesake debunks the would-be smoothness of the glo-
bal village and stresses the immateriality of the migrant experience. At
the end of the novel, as she is about to leave the country where she had
migrated as a young woman to share her time between India and the US,
where she is to stay six months a year with her children, the newly wid-
owed Ashima realizes that she has become ‘a resident everywhere and
nowhere’ (276). The episode of her son Gogol holding the camera whose
weight reassures him as he is looking at the now empty room where
he has grown up epitomizes the immateriality of im/migrant experi-
ence, like lives hanging by a thread. This motif is also present in Monica
Ali’s Brick Lane, in which the heroine Nazneen contemplates the tickets
bought by her husband in preparation for their return to Bangladesh,
thinking that they are so flimsy, ‘so lacking in substance’ (355).
The fragility of the articulation between the two halves of a life
accounts for the prevalence of the home motif, which is as in the case
of the postcolonial politics of home assigned to a specific function and
made to play a crucial part in the migrant’s experience. To a certain
extent, the home marks the inscription of the diasporic self into the
new land, but it also allows him to shelter his other half and keep the
home country alive. In The Namesake, the assertion of im/migrant iden-
tity through a territorial inscription onto the land is brought up several
times in the novel, whether it be when a group of children shorten the
name Ganguli written on the mailbox to GANG (67) or when Gogol
desperately looks for streets bearing his name or for namesakes on the
stone slabs of cemeteries.
To a certain extent, the home becomes the reflection of the immi-
grant’s life abroad; it can either bear witness to a successful journey to
the promised land or expose his failure to make good, like the home in
Small Island. Not to forget Biju’s accommodation in The Inheritance of
Loss, in a Harlem basement where he camps with a ‘shifting population
of men’. Beyond the social dimension of the house as a sign of success
or failure, the house which fails to become a home is emblematic of the
im/migrant’s inability to become rooted and reterritorialized.
The home either becomes a place of confinement where the old self
of the im/migrant becomes locked up, as the descriptions of Chanu’s
and Nazneen’s flat at the beginning of the text seem to suggest (Ali,
2003) – a flat packed with furniture, as if the immigrants were trying
to facilitate their rerooting through material grounding and settling

of the land in an ironical replay of colonial episodes. Or it can act as
an interface, a locus of interaction with the outside world, for example
when Nazneen observes Karim to try and learn how to integrate. The
difference in attitudes between Chanu and Nazneen is conveyed in the
difference in the way they articulate inside/outside, home country and
host country. Any attempt made by Chanu at reterritorializing himself
in the UK is doomed to failure; even the computer he buys with a view
to getting on the internet fails to act as an efficient interface and ends
up covered in cobwebs, a useless object of modernity which fails in
its role as a tool of integration, leaving Chanu neither here nor there.
Not to mention the home one plans to have built in the homeland
and which is one of the key motifs of homecoming narratives. Nazneen
stays in the UK while her husband Chanu returns to Bangladesh and
one of his dreams is to have a house built.
The current questioning of the home motif in diasporic texts reflects
a certain awareness of the evanescence of the diasporic experience. In
The Politics of Home, Rosemary Marangoly George remarks that ‘the sen-
timent accompanying the absence of home – homesickness – can cut
two ways: it could be a yearning for the authentic home (situated in the
past or in the future) or it could be the recognition of the inauthenticity
or the created aura of all homes’ (Marangoly George, 1999 [1996] 74).
This duality in the treatment of the home motif is to be paralleled with
the development of the theme of luggage17 – either actual or metaphor-
ical ones in recent contemporary fiction. Marangoly George sketches
the development of the luggage motif from an early immigration novel,
Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) – in which Oliver leaves
Jamaica and settles in London without any luggage and reckons that
there is ‘no sense to load up myself with a set of things’ (18) – to a
more recent novel, Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack. She suggests a distinction
between two types of immigrants, those who travel light like Oliver
and those who come loaded with all their belongings; this second cat-
egory could include a recent novel like Andrea Levy’s Small Island in
which the Jamaican fiancée turns up on her fiancé’s doorstep with a
trunk which he has to carry up the stairs (and as one might imagine,
characters who travel light sometimes have less difficulties integrating).
The luggage motif as opposed to the home opens onto an interesting
reflection on the link between home and identity. To a certain extent,
luggage as a transportable set of belongings takes on a paradigmatic sta-
tus facilitating a better understanding of how identity can be conceived
of independently of territorialization and root identity.18 It reasserts
the importance of the past, of one’s experience and memories, but a

past which is not frozen in time or place, a past which is transportable,
mobile and can be reconfigured so as to make sense in a new context. In
Ali’s novel Brick Lane, Chanu’s conception of identity as frozen in time
and impervious to change is not only challenged by the experience of
immigration, but it also prevents him from relocating himself psycho-
logically in England. His wife Nazneen on the other hand, who is a lot
more rooted in traditional identity and even described as the typical
Bengali wife, has a more open and centrifugal conception of identity
which makes room for reinvention.
The development of the luggage motif somehow contrasts, at least
in appearance with another motif, that of the homecoming journey.
The increasing importance of the homecoming journey in many novels
from the South Asian Diaspora coincides with a contextual change in
the representation of national identity in Indian literature and in the
arts in general – the Bollywood film industry plays an active role in
revamping the homeland, its newly established modernity which has
none of the failings of the West. It also coincides with a change in the
status of the diaspora. The Indian government has created a new cat-
egory (‘non resident Indians’) to take account of the existence of its
diaspora. But more importantly, the homecoming theme bears witness
to some unresolved crisis centred on the need for roots, for bearings,
and ultimately the wish to belong. It seems almost paradoxical that
diasporic texts which deal with mobility, displacement and reinvention
should express such a longing for roots and bearings. Rather than a
critique of the very idea of im/migration and displacement, they ques-
tion contemporary myths of mobility. Biju’s narrative of a failed success
story or Chanu’s return to Bangladesh point as much to a celebration of
home, roots and past identity as at the bitter realization of the lures of
Western myths. In other words and by a way of conclusion to this sec-
tion, these contemporary texts do not constitute a general indictment
of the diasporic experience as a whole, but mark a radical departure
from Western mythology relating to immigration and displacement.
The semiotics of interstitiality
In the previous sections I have brushed in broad brushstrokes the dif-

ferent landmarks in the process of identity reassignment as they have
been analysed in relation to postcoloniality and as they have been rep-
resented in contemporary diasporic literature. Whether the diasporic
subject succeeds in articulating the two sides of his diasporic life – his
two selves – or not, and manages to ‘negotiate’19 between them, his dual
nature lingers on as a constitutive feature inscribed at the heart of the
diasporic subject. As Linda Hutcheon aptly puts it:
Doubleness is the essence of migrant experience. Caught between

two worlds, the immigrant negotiates a new social space; caught
between two cultures and often two languages, the writer negotiates
a new literary space. (Hutcheon, 1990, 9)
This doubleness has also been described by Edward Said in a passage

which points at the constitutive disjuncture of the diasporic subject
and the diasporic experience.
ALL FAMILIES INVENT THEIR PARENTS AND CHILDREN, GIVE

each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language. There was
always something wrong with how I was invented and meant to fit
in with the world of my parents and four sisters. Whether this was
because I constantly misread my part or because of some deep flaw
in my being I could not tell for most of my early life. Sometimes I
was intransigent, and proud of it. At other times I seemed to myself
to be nearly devoid of any character at all, timid, uncertain, without
will. Yet the overriding sensation I had was of always being out of
place. Thus it took me about fifty years to become accustomed to,
or, more exactly, to feel less uncomfortable with, ‘Edward’, a fool-
ishly English name yoked forcibly to the unmistakably Arabic family
name Said. True my mother told me that I had been named Edward
after the Prince of Wales, who cut so fine a figure in 1935, the year
of my birth, and Said was the name of various uncles and cousins.
But the rationale of my name broke down both when I discovered
no grandparents called Said and when I tried to connect my fancy
English name with its Arabic partner. (Said, 1999, 3)
In this passage drawn from his autobiography Out of Place Edward Said
points out two key features of diasporic identity. The first, which is
not specific to diasporic identity, but could apply to identity in gen-
eral, is the link between identity and representation, and the fact that
identity exists not only in pre-designated definitions but also in rela-
tion to a process of self-definition and representation. This idea links
up with Stuart Hall’s definition of identity as ‘a “production”, which is
never complete, always in the process, and always constituted within,
not outside, representation’ (Hall, 1990, 223).20 But Said also stresses the
disjuncture at the heart of the diasporic experience which almost bor-

ders on schizophrenia. His name, which he sees as the ultimate marker
of this duality is a collage of two elements taken from two cultural con-
tinua which are juxtaposed and the very jarringness of this incongru-
ous juxtaposition points to the discrepancy at the heart of the diasporic
experience.
The jarringness of the diasporic experience and to a certain extent
of the diasporic subject is a theme often brought up not only in liter-
ary texts but also in essays by diasporic writers or in more theoretical
texts addressing the issue of diasporic experience. In an essay called
‘Bradford’ (Kureishi, 1986), Hanif Kureishi described the duality at the
root of migrant experience and points to the jarring polarities of young
Asians born and raised in Britain and who seem to embrace the values
and fashions of the West such as pop music or Western films, while
retaining their traditional values and religion.
This duality creates interpretative difficulties, not only because the
diasporic subject seldom fits into established categories, but also because
certain cultural signifiers are stripped of their traditional meaning and
re-encoded. In Brick Lane, Monica Ali imagines a character of Bangladeshi
origin, who was born and bred in the UK, and whose rootlessness leads
him to crave bearings. At the end of the novel, he takes to wearing trad-
itional clothes instead of jeans, in an attempt at finding a more solid
identity in authenticity. Despite his efforts to integrate the markers of
traditional identity, the discrepancy of his transmongrified self resur-
faces and is expressed through metaphors like the quilt on which the
stitches are visible. But more interestingly, this character poses a real
problem of interpretation, precisely because his whole persona juxta-
poses signs taken from different cultural continua. When Nazneen first
sees him, she thinks that he is a perfectly integrated immigrant. He
speaks perfect English and has a cell phone, which to her is a symbol
of modernity. Only later does she realize that the cell phone is used to
remind him of prayer time, in a kind of postmodern irony which juxta-
poses what the West would consider a marker of modernity with long-
standing traditions. What is perplexing is not so much this duality, as
the fact that the codes are telescoped and the signs re-encoded, which
poses interpretative difficulties and prompts a more general reflection
on semiotics and the nature and status of signs, their transience, their
capacity to be detached from existing signifieds and yoked to new ones,
in other words their fundamentally contextual nature.
Understanding interstitial identities therefore requires a move from
traditional categories as well as a reassessment of theoretical paradigms
dealing with identity. By bringing together signifieds from different

cultural continua, telescoping codes, the migrant evidences the need
for new categories which move away from the singularities of existing
ones. It is in this sense that the hybrid as it is defined by Homi Bhabha
in The Location of Culture calls for new interpretative patterns, theoret-
ical paradigms and taxonomies.
The move away from the singularities of ‘class’ or ‘gender’ as primary

conceptual and organizational categories, has resulted in an aware-
ness of the subject positions – of race, gender, generation, institu-
tional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation – that inhabit
any claim to identity in the modern world. What is theoretically
innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond nar-
ratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those
moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cul-
tural differences. These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for
elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that ini-
tiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, in
the act of defining the idea of society itself. (Bhabha, 1996 [1994] 1)
In this redefinition of identity, Bhabha dismisses a definition of iden-

tity as monolithic and one-dimensional and rejects the identity of block
identities. He shows how categories interact on a vertical axis (gender,
class, etc.). This vertical axis is also subjected to time and potential
changes, so much so that identity has to be redefined. It is not the sum
of ‘pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet or tradition’
but must be defined as ‘social articulation’ and ‘on-going negotiation’
(Bhabha, 1994, [1996] 2). The consequence of such a rejection of iden-
tity as monolithic and uni-faceted is that it calls for a new theory of
identity which makes room for new identities based on a combination
of other categories. What is interesting is that this redefinition of the
semiotics of the interstice does not foreground a principle of the blur-
ring of codes. The term hybridity as used by Bhabha is not synonymous
with mixture; it is more a quilt than magma.
As Bhabha also points out, the paradigmatic shift not only applies
to im/migrants, but to societies, which are nowadays increasingly
multicultural – hence the timeliness of the notion of interstitiality.
The migrant figure, the everywhere man is not only the spearhead of
diasporic fiction as an emerging genre; it is also present in other types
of diasporic novels, whereby I mean novels written by authors emanat-
ing from former diasporas who choose to engage with diasporic issues
instead of moving away from them. In recent years I have been struck
by the broadening of the scope of the novelist Philip Roth for example,
who, as some critics have remarked, has moved away from a focus on
identity as exclusively linked to that of the Jewish community in the
US to embrace diverse issues related to other diasporas.21 In the follow-
ing discussion of his novel The Human Stain, I propose to discuss the
articulation between novels written by diasporic subjects and issues of
interstitiality and in particular to show how this type of novel addresses
the issue of the semiotics of interstitiality which is raised in contempor-
ary diasporic texts.
The Human Stain can be read as an indictment of existing identity
definitions and in particular the constraints of monolithic categories
denounced by Homi Bhabha. This novel spans a broad spectrum of
characters of various ages and origins – both ethnic and social – who
all struggle through an identity crisis. The story of the protagonist,
Coleman Silk, takes us back to the days of the colour bar in a segre-
gated community in America and chronicles the life of a child of Afro-
American descent, whose white skin allows him to pass for white but
forces him to relinquish every aspect of it and to sever all ties with his
family. The other characters who stem from various cultural and eco-
nomic backgrounds, raise other issues linked to identity. Among them
is Delphine Roux, a French-born academic who comes to realize that
despite her theoretical and practical knowledge of American culture,
her mastery of the language and her academic credentials, she will
always remain an outsider, the ‘poor misunderstood foreigner’ (Roth,
2001 [2000] 277), unable to relate to people at a personal level.
On closer analysis, despite the complexities of the characters’ person-
alities, each one of them seems to represent a certain definition of iden-
tity in the sense that each character has a specific way of defining not
only his/her identity but also the way identity should be established.
Mark, Coleman Silk’s son, voices his need to know where he comes from
in order to understand who he is. In a passage recounting Mark’s child-
hood, the narrator insists on his longing for origins and on his need to
know the story of his family.
This was the story he told Iris as well. All of it was invented for Iris.
[...] And the only one never satisfied was Mark. ‘Where did our great-
grandparents come from?’ Russia. ‘But what city?’ I asked my father
and mother, but they never seemed to know for sure. One time it was
one place, one time another. There was a whole generation of Jews
like that. They never really knew. The old people didn’t talk about
it much, and the American children weren’t that curious, they were
het up on being Americans, and so, in my family as in many fam-
ilies, there was a general Jewish geographical amnesia. All I got when
I asked, Coleman told them, was the answer ‘Russia.’ But Markie said,
‘Russia is gigantic, Dad. Where in Russia? Markie would not be still.’
(Roth, 2001 [2000] 176)
This myth of origins, fabricated by Coleman for the benefit of his son
Mark, points to the importance of geographical roots as a prerequis-
ite for identity. Unlike his father, who has severed all links with the
past and whose fake identity has forced him to reject his family and
to commit a matricide – at least symbolically – Mark craves roots. This
example allows Roth to suggest a first definition of identity as tethered
to a place, a conception which involves a clear topographical mapping
of one’s origins.
A more problematic definition of identity as involving a complex
negotiation between existing definitions – and antagonistic ones – is
introduced into the novel through the character of Delphine Roux.
Although the novel is replete with references to her exotic Frenchness,
which seems to set her off as a cultural stereotype, her identity grad-
ually emerges as slightly more complex and brings into tension three
different definitions of identity. But because these three definitions
foreground monolithic identities, they fail to apprehend the complex-
ities of her multi-layered self, which combines her cultural heritage (the
‘given’) and what I shall refer to as ‘the chosen.’ For example we learn
that her mother became for her:
the shadow of her accomplishments but, even worse, of her family,

the shadow of the Walincourts, named after the place given to them
in the thirteenth century by the King Saint Louis and conforming
still to the family ideals as they were set in the thirteenth century.
How Delphine hated all those families, the pure and ancient aris-
tocracy of the provinces, all of them thinking the same, looking the
same, sharing the same stifling values and the same stifling religious
obedience. (Roth, 2001 [2000] 274–5)
Through this reference to Delphine’s roots, in both the geographical

and genealogical sense of the term, Roth suggests that Delphine’s iden-
tity combines time and space. It is derived from the land and a sense of
territorial belonging, cemented by habitus and elevated to the realm of
the sacred through the mediation of the King, who in the days before
the French Revolution, was considered to be the representative of God

on earth. At the same time, Delphine is a former student of the École
Normale Supérieure, which not only sets her off as an elite scholar but
as an heiress to the principles of the French republic, since the École
Normale Supérieure was founded after the revolution to select the best
and most promising students from any social class to give them the best
possible education. In other words, its aim was to break away from what
Bourdieu calls the cycle of ‘social reproduction’, with a view to promot-
ing social mobility. Delphine thus embodies the difficult negotiation
between two strictly opposed conceptions of identity, a traditional and
outdated definition of identity as ‘the given’, and the modern defin-
ition inherited from the revolution, of identity as shaped by the indi-
vidual with the help of society. This situation is further complicated by
her departure for America, the nation of the melting pot, based on the
theory of an acceptance of cultural diversity rather than homogeneity,
thus opting for a third definition of identity. In La République coloniale,
Françoise Vergès suggests that although France and the United States
seem to share the same idea of national identity, France is a nation
of immigrants which denies this heterogeneous component and fore-
grounds a principle of sameness and unity hinging on the acceptance
of similar principles. On the contrary, the American theory of the
melting pot accepts and prides itself on the diversity of its population.
In light of all this, Delphine Roux emerges as a lot more than a one-
dimensional character. Her complex identity becomes a paradigm for
the complexities of contemporary identity, at the crossroads between
various conceptions. The representation of identities sketched by Roth
could be compared to tectonic plates, each one bearing a certain defin-
ition of identity; when coming into contact, these plates generate a sort
of overdetermination of identities, since the individual finds himself
caught between different frameworks, while striving to find an inter-
stice where s/he could freely determine his/her own self, independently
of existing definitions.
One of the consequences of Roth’s emphasis on the complexity of
identity definition in The Human Stain, is the relevance or lack of rele-
vance of labels when it comes to identity. In a sense, the novel can be
read as an indictment of existing theories of identity, whose limits it
repeatedly shows. Each character is defined by society in a fixed, mono-
lithic and limiting way. Yet the personalities of Roth’s characters show
that none of these definitions – taken on their own – fully applies to
the characters. It is more a case of combining the different definitions
and accepting that an individual is the result of a negotiation between
several of them, which in turn form a new one and contribute to an

infinite spectrum of identities, thus calling for new interpretative pat-
terns which should prove able to take account of the fluidity, the com-
plexity and the provisionality of identity.
There is more to Delphine Roux’s failure to see through Coleman’s
fiction of a WASP identity than an indictment of her academic remote-
ness and her inability to engage in human matters. The irony directed
at Delphine Roux is underpinned by a more serious issue. In his por-
trayal of Delphine Roux and in particular her lack of clairvoyance
when it comes to grasping the complexities of Coleman Silk, Roth calls
for an indictment of theory, not only of structuralism but all theories
based on one-dimensional categories, and in particular theories that
essentialize human beings and uproot them from a context and poten-
tial changes. Delphine Roux’s mistake does not only originate in her
inability to read signs but also in her inability to articulate categories
and to situate others at the crossroads between several categories. The
following example points at the way she completely misreads the situ-
ation between Coleman and Faunia which she mistakes for a tale of
oppression. What her lack of judgment points at is the temptation to
reduce the complexity of interstitial identities to predefined patterns
and existing narratives such as that of the oppressed woman exploited
by a bourgeois male, in Roux’s not very successful attempt at a Marxian
and feminist discourse.
She was still seething at the thought of the viciousness that could
make of this dreadfully disadvantaged woman who had already lost
everything a toy, that could capriciously turn a suffering human
being like Faunia Farley into a plaything so as to revenge himself on
her. (Roth, 2001 [2000] 195)
Delphine thus allows Roth to foreground here the complexity of iden-

tity as provisional and multi-layered, not as something that can be
pinned down but as a fragile balance. The mindset of this character
prompts a larger reflection on the need to rethink contextual frame-
works in a context of shifting identities. The following chapter seeks to
analyse the ways in which diasporic texts undo existing patterns and
propose new models.
3
Interstitiality, Authenticity,
Postmodernity
Groups have fallen back on the idea of cultural nationalism,

on the overintegrated conceptions of culture which present
immutable, ethnic differences as an absolute break in the his-
tories and experiences of ‘black’ and ‘white’ people. Against
this choice stands another, more difficult opposition: the the-
orisation of creolisation, métissage, mestizaje, and hybridity.
From the viewpoint of ethnic absolutism, this would be a lit-
any of pollution and impurity.
(Gilroy, 1993, 2)
The current popularity of post-colonial discourse that impli-

cates solely the West often obscures the colonizing relation-
ship of the East in relation to Africa and other parts of the
Third World. We often forget that many Third World nation-
als bring to this country the same kind of contempt and dis-
respect for blackness that is most frequently associated with
white western imperialism [...] Within feminist movements
Third World nationals often assume the role of mediator or
interpreter, explaining the ‘bad’ black people to understand
whiteness ... Unwittingly assuming the role of go-between, of
mediator, she reinscribes a colonial paradigm.
(hooks, 1990, 93–4)
In the previous chapter I have discussed the ways in which interstitial

identities resulting from diasporic contexts pose several challenges in
terms of semiotics and taxonomy. I now propose to turn to another
consequence of the existence of interstitial identities: the fact that they
have recently emerged as forces which redefine national identity in
50
Interstitiality, Authenticity, Postmodernity 51
the countries where they are to be found. In recent years, their non-
conformity with existing definitions of national identity has become
hard to ignore; so have the dissenting voices which have started to chal-
lenge openly the limits and parameters of Englishness, such as that of
Andrea Levy and her rather daring claim that ‘[i]f Englishness doesn’t
define me, then redefine Englishness’1 (Levy in Jaggi, 1996, 64). Writers
like Levy or Kureishi have not only voiced the claims of disenfranchised
minorities to become integrated into the national definition of identity.
They have also stressed the need to interrogate the very definitions of
identity inherited from the nation state and to rethink the way land/
race/language/culture have been aligned. It is in this sense that Kureishi
calls for ‘fresh ways of seeing Britain’:
It is the British, the white British, who have to learn that being
British isn’t what it was. Now it is a more complex thing, involving
new elements. So there must be a fresh way of seeing Britain and the
choices it faces: and a new way of being British after all this time.
(Kureishi, 1986, 38)
This need has been widely reflected in the literatures from the
diasporas where diasporic characters have started not only to come
centre stage but also to challenge and destabilize white middle-class
ones, ultimately prompting them to reconsider the boundary between
self and other. Mark Stein has remarked that ‘[t]he black British novel of
transformation [...] has a dual function: it is about the formation of its
protagonists as well as the transformation of British society and cultural
institutions’ (Stein, 2004, 22).
This issue needs to be recontextualized in various ways. Specific
answers to the development of diversity need to be taken into account,
but the question also calls for a more in-depth discussion of the two
poles around which debates on identity have crystallized in the last
decades: postmodernity and its questioning of fixed and monolithic
patterns of identity, but also authenticity. Indeed, one of the questions
that have emerged in recent decades is how these new identities, ever
in the making and evolving as they are, link up with postmodern iden-
tities. Iain Chambers conceives of postmodern identities as decom-
posed and recomposed,2 as engaged in a process of definition which
resembles ‘an open-journey without a goal’ involving ‘a continual fabu-
lation, an invention, a construction in which there is no fixed identity
or final destination’ (Chambers, 1994, 25). The link between these new
identities in the making, corresponding to de facto new ethnicities in
search of an official definition, and postmodernity, has been repeatedly

stressed, to the point of suggesting that the complexity inherent in the
various reconfigurations of personal identity through diasporic experi-
ence can be read as an epiphenomenon of postmodernity. This question
extends beyond the scope of this chapter and perhaps even beyond that
of this book; I have decided however to venture some hypotheses in
later chapters (Chapter 5). For the time being, I would like to concen-
trate on another aspect of the link between postmodern identities and
diasporic ones, which is the redefinition of the power struggle between
centre and margins. In a famous text, Stuart Hall has described not
without a hint of humour what he has called the ‘de-centering of the
centre,’ a phenomenon he has accounted for by citing the fact that the
margins have not become more centred; it is the centre itself that has
become decentred:
Now that, in the postmodern age, you all feel so dispersed, I become
centred. What I’ve thought of as dispersed and fragmented comes
paradoxically, to be the representative modern experience! This is
‘coming home with a vengeance!’ ... I’ve been puzzled by the fact that
young black people in London today are marginalized, fragmented,
unenfranchised, disadvantaged and dispersed. And yet, they look as
if they own the territory. Somehow, they too, in spite of everything
are centred, in place: without much material support, it’s true, but
nevertheless they occupy a new kind of space at the centre. (Hall in
Appignanesi, 1987, 44)
But the link between identity and postmodernity also needs to be inter-
rogated in relation to the way identity constructions have been affected
by what I have called in the previous chapter the crisis of the grand
narrative of identity, a crisis which has shaken the foundations of the
notion of authenticity, even if, as I shall argue in the following discus-
sion, things are not as simple as they seem.
In a famous passage quoted by Iain Chambers in his Migrancy,
Culture, Identity, Chicano novelist Arturo Islas suggests that ‘the increas-
ing nomadism of modern thought’ and ‘the loss of roots’ have gen-
erated a ‘waning of the grammar of authenticity’ (Islas in Chambers,
1994, 18–19):
To the forcibly induced migrations of slaves, peasants, the poor, and

the ex-colonial world that make up so many of the hidden histories
of modernity, we can also add the increasing nomadism of modern
thought. [...] Faced with a loss of roots, and the subsequent weaken-
ing in the grammar of ‘authenticity,’ we move into a vaster land-
scape. Our sense of belonging, our language and the myths we carry
in us remain, but no longer as ‘origins’ or signs of ‘authenticity’ cap-
able of guaranteeing the sense of our lives. They now linger on as
traces, voices, memories and murmurs that are mixed in with other
histories, episodes encounters. (Islas in Chambers, 1994, 18–19)
This observation, which is extremely pertinent, requires to be qualified

somehow, not so much in terms of its validity as in terms of the extent
to which the debunking of authenticity has been fully taken on board
outside the field of theory. In the following discussion, I propose to
examine how the notion of authenticity has resisted waves of decon-
structionist criticism to resurface in areas where theoretical daringness
and radicalism have found their limits. These fields of persisting ten-
sion are, to say the least, politically vexed terrains where authenticity
has become the spearhead of political resistance.
As I briefly pointed out in the previous chapter, the appearance of
a more critical approach to the issue of authenticity coincided, both
chronologically and logically with a general reassessment of the ques-
tion of identity in the wake of deconstructionism, which posited that
identity is not an already existing category but a construct, generated by
and developed through discourse in collusion with the interests, goals
and desires3 of dominant cultures (Spurr, 1993; Clifford and Marcus,
1986; Lowe, 1991; Young, 1995) – in other words the West. Identity and
more specifically the making of identity – whether it be personal iden-
tity or group identity – aroused interest in a range of disciplines ranging
from ethnology (Gladney, 1998) to sociology (Bauman, 2004) or history
(Hobsbawm, 1990). Ernest Gellner’s influential statement that ‘[n]ation-
alism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents
nations where they do not exist’ (Gellner, 1964) aptly sums up the
departure from an essentialist stance and the general consensus about
the deconstructionist outlook often found in these various fields.
Yet authenticity has not disappeared altogether, any more than race
or ethnicity have. The two passages I have quoted at the beginning of
the chapter represent the two poles between which critics and theorists
dealing with identity issues have situated themselves in the last fifty
years. bell hooks’s voice represents the counter-discursive approach
which asserts blackness in a radical way while Gilroy’s sets out to under-
stand the interaction between Western discourse and its others, white
modernism and the Black Atlantic. When opposing Gilroy’s position
to that of hooks, I mean to suggest that this issue has led to the devel-
opment of two radically opposed views, but also that this debate goes
beyond the black/white Eastern/Western divide. The approach advo-
cated by Gilroy is not the product of a Western theorist engrossed in
abstractions but that of a black theorist attempting to understand the
construction of blackness by whites, to trace its historical development
and examine various answers provided by black artists and writers
who have succeeded in undermining White discourse (Gilroy, 2000b).
This allows Gilroy to evidence the role played by blacks in modernism
(Gilroy, 1993). What interests me is that Gilroy refuses Afrocentrism
as much as he rejects Eurocentrism when he examines the use of the
concept of authenticity in movements of vindication of black identity
(Gilroy, chapter 3). For him, the root of the problem is the rigidity of the
‘pseudo-biological definition of national cultures,’ a rigidity which is
not only to be found in the discourse of the West but also in other forms
of ethnic absolutism, such as Afrocentrism. Rather than fighting the
rhetoric of Western absolutism or merely inverting this category, Gilroy
interrogates the workings and construction of such definitions.
The unifying notion of an open blackness has been largely rejected

and replaced by more particularistic conceptions of cultural differ-
ence. This retreat from a politically constructed notion of racial
solidarity has initiated a compensatory recovery of narrowly ethnic
culture and identity. Indeed, the aura of authentic ethnicity supplies
a special form of comfort in a situation where the very historicity of
black experience is constantly undermined. These political and his-
torical shifts are registered in the cultural realm. The growth of reli-
gious fundamentalism among some Asian-descended populations is
an obvious sign of their significance, and there may be similar proc-
esses at work in the experience of the peoples of Caribbean descent
for whom an equivalent retreat into pure ethnicity has acquired pro-
nounced generational features. Their desire to anchor themselves in
racial particularity is not dominated by the longing to return to the
Victorian certainties and virtues of Caribbean cultural life. However,
in conjunction with the pressures of economic recession and populist
racism, this yearning has driven many older settlers to return to the
lands in which they were born. Among their descendants, the same
desire to withdraw has achieved a very different form of expression. It
has moved towards an overarching Africentrism which can be read as
inventing its own totalising conception of black culture. This new eth-
nicity is all the more powerful because it corresponds to no actually
existing black communities. Its radical utopianism, often anchored in

the ethical bedrock provided by the history of the Nile Valley civilisa-
tions, transcends the parochialism of Caribbean memories in favour
of a heavily mythologised Africanity that is itself stamped by its ori-
gins not in Africa but in a variety of pan-African ideology produced
more recently by black America. (Gilroy, 1993, 86–7)
Gilroy’s scepticism also has the merit of refusing any form of radic-
alism, even when radicalism seems like a politically valid answer to
centuries of oppression. In this respect, his interrogation of the cluster
nation/culture/race goes further than bell hooks’s strong positioning
against the ethnic absolutism of the West which fails to undermine
the faulty logic of imperialist discourse, and can be reproached with
fighting colonial and imperial discourse with the same tools they used,
a shortcoming other critics have noted. Suleiri for example has writ-
ten that: ‘[r]ather than extending an inquiry into the discursive pos-
sibilities represented by the intersection of gender and race, feminist
intellectuals like hooks misuse their status as minority voices by enact-
ing strategies of belligerence that at this time are more divisive than
informative’ (Suleiri, 1995, 142). But the issue is not as simple as it may
seem and we are immediately faced with a major difficulty, namely that
the limits of postcolonial theoretical discourse become apparent when
politically vexed terrains are its focus.
In order to illustrate this point I would like briefly to discuss a case of
resurgence of the notion of authenticity which to me illustrates the idea
that if the linearity of narratives has been disrupted and the notion of
authenticity questioned, it tends to resurface in certain areas where this
gesture is legitimized – or at least thought to be legitimate – because of
the political situation. In Australia, in the years that followed the Mabo
Treaty, which called into question the notion of terra nullius, which had
justified – to some at least – the colonization of Australia by the white
settlers and the subsequent appropriation of native territory, a most
interesting case came to the notice of theorists not only in Australia
but also abroad. In 1996, an article published in The Australian Magazine
(Laurie, 1996) threw into question the identity of leading Aboriginal
writer Mudrooroo4 on the grounds that recent genealogical research
carried out by his sister seemed to indicate that he was not ‘truly’
Aboriginal.5 What could have remained a trivial story was thrown
into the spotlight and triggered off a heated debate among critics and
indigenous writers alike as well as among political activists. Although
some indigenous writers supported Mudrooroo, the bulk of indigenous
writers did not side with him. One of the reasons given has to do with
traditional conceptions of the transmission of the indigenous cultural
heritage: in traditional Aboriginal culture, which is oral, only indigen-
ous people are allowed to pass stories and legends down to others, and
they are only permitted to do so within the community. The fact that
Mudrooroo was not a true Aborigine made him unfit for this task. This
case fosters debate and prompts a great deal of questions on various
planes: ethical, political, theoretical, to mention only a few and also
questions the role and responsibility of Western critics. In other words,
should the Western critic argue against the blood-based definition of
identity which resurfaced in the course of the debates, when aboriginal-
ity was defined in terms of blood quantum, or let the indigenous popu-
lation, already weakened if not decimated by colonization, decide on
their own issues. A good understanding of what is at stake in this debate
requires that the incident be recontextualized in the broader context of
the land claims of the 1990s. In the years that followed the Mabo treaty,
many indigenous communities started to lay claim to lands to such an
extent that many white Australians became afraid of losing their lands.
We can easily imagine what doubts the existence of ‘untrue’ Aborigines
could have introduced into the minds of both white Australians and
Black Australians. To the latter, the controversy over a ‘pass for native’
writer was embarrassing since the Mudrooroo episode could be used as
an excuse to undermine certain land claims under the pretext that all
Aborigines were not true Aborigines. This may explain why, independ-
ently of ancestral beliefs, Aborigines were more or less forced to draw
the line between true Aborigines and those who pass for Aborigines,
therefore brandishing the argument of authenticity and reviving a fatal
definition of race based on blood. What this case points to, and the
reasons why I find it so interesting is precisely because it seems to lead
to the following paradox: it is right for the oppressed to argue his case
in any way he chooses, preferably in his own terms, even if this implies
resorting to a category of race reduced to the lowest common denom-
inator. The Western critic therefore finds himself in a difficult position
which results in the following dilemma: condemning authenticity
when it is used as an argument by the oppressor but condoning it when
it is employed by the oppressed to bolster up their case.
The predicament theorists are faced with today is therefore to rethink
identity independently of the notion of authenticity, but without
reducing it to abstract polarities as the more radical post-structuralist
approaches have tended to do. As Homi Bhabha has noticed, one of
the consequences of studies focusing on counter-discursive strategies is
that self and other have become two poles, two abstract signifiers, inter-
related, interdependent (the self needs the other in order to be truly
himself). In the process, self and other have been stripped of their onto-
logical depth. In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha writes that
What is profoundly unresolved, even erased, in the discourses

of poststructuralism is that perspective of depth through which the
authenticity of identity comes to be reflected in the glassy metaphor-
ics of the mirror and its mimetic or realist narratives. Shifting the
frame of identity from the field of vision to the space of writing inter-
rogates the third dimension that gives profundity to the representa-
tion of self and Other. (Bhabha, 1994, 48)
This chapter therefore seeks to examine how literature by second gen-

eration immigrants prompts us to rethink national definitions of iden-
tity, but also how it allows us to gain a better understanding of the
resurgence of the problem of identity in second generation immigrants,
which is posed in a different way from in the case of first generation
immigrants. The three sections of this chapter will examine the way
national identity is questioned by diasporas in the UK, but also in the
US where the American melting pot model itself seems to be in crisis,
before concentrating on the case of double diasporas.
Rethinking the continuity land/race/language/culture and

the temptation of authenticity in Fruit of the Lemon by
Andrea Levy
This section and the following one deal with texts by and about second
generation immigrants. Although the term ‘second generation immi-
grants’ exists in many languages as a way of referring to children born
in contexts of immigration, it nonetheless remains problematic and
ambiguous because of the gesture it implies and which introduces
doubts as to the child’s belonging. As Hanif Kureishi remarks in his
essay entitled ‘Bradford’, the term introduces a discontinuity in the
child’s representation of his identity and doubts as to the continuity
between the country of his birth and his sense of belonging.
When I was in my teens, in the mid-1960s, there was much talk of

the ‘problems’ that kids of my colour and generation faced in Britain
because of our racial mix or because our parents were immigrants.
We didn’t know where we belonged it was said, we were neither fish
nor fowl. I remember reading that kind of thing in the newspaper.

We were frequently referred to as ‘second-generation immigrants’
just so there was no mistake about our not belonging in Britain.
(Kureishi, 2002, 70)
Not only does the term ‘second generation immigrants’ cast doubts over
the second generation immigrants’ sense of belonging, it also confronts
them, rather violently with the idea of im/migration and displacement
in a rather ironic way since these people may not have been outside the
national frontiers of their country of birth. The label itself, through its
epistemic violence, generates a form of alienation as well as a more pro-
found sense of destabilization and ‘un-settlement’.
In this section I propose to discuss some of the mechanisms at play
in the shaping of identity in the case of second generation immigrants
and focus on the difference between first and second generation immi-
grants through an analysis of Andrea Levy’s novel Fruit of the Lemon.6
The following discussion will focus respectively on the questioning
of the alignment land/race/language/culture in the novel, and on the
strategies of reinvention of the self.
The issue of identity is first introduced through Faith, the protagon-
ist, a black girl born into a family of immigrants from Jamaica. Faith’s
case provides a good illustration of Kureishi’s reference to the way
second generation immigrants find their sense of belonging in Britain
questioned by the fact that they are constantly labelled as ‘second gen-
eration immigrants’. The identity crisis undergone by Faith is all the
more unexpected as she grew up in London, in a rather cosmopolitan
environment, and seems a perfectly happy Black Briton. There are how-
ever a series of proleptic events which cast a shadow over her integra-
tion and which point to the emergence of racial issues, like her being
turned down for a job with the BBC, or witnessing a scene of racial
violence. But the real event which constitutes a turning point in her
quiet life as a young Brit, is when she is asked by a friend of a friend, in
the countryside, where she is from. When she gathers that ‘London’ is
not the expected answer, she then hears herself say ‘Jamaica,’ a place
she has never been to, a place which her parents keep referring to as
‘the homeland’ without sparking the faintest interest in their daughter.
What the question of her origins and the friend of a friend’s reaction to
her first answer (London) actually imply is a continuity between land/
race/language/culture. This definition has its origins in the definition
of the nation state; yet this theoretical alignment of notions, which
have become increasingly hard to define, let alone pin down, persists
in the imaginary of national identity, at least in the minds of white

Britons, as Faith finds out much to her dismay. The fact that Faith is
not of the ‘right’ colour immediately excludes her from this rigid align-
ment which seems to leave little room for redefinitions. The identity
crisis undergone by Faith in the days that follow this event, and which
manifests itself through a bout of depression which leaves her prostrate
at home, her mirrors covered so as to hide the reflection of a black self
she has now learnt to consider as ‘other’, is a good illustration of Fanon’s
idea that the black man integrates the discourse on blackness and comes
to regard himself as a black ‘other’. Fanon refers to this phenomenon as
the ‘third person consciousness’ (Fanon, 1952, 110).
If Levy points to the emergence of the question of identity, which
forces the ‘Brit of foreign origins’ to reinterpret his/her life in light of
the parents’ move to a new country, she also interrogates the various
ways of dealing with racial otherness and the tactics of self-redefinition
which in the novel range from ‘whitening’ to seeking certain forms of
authenticity. The concept of ‘whitening’ comes from Frantz Fanon, who
used it to analyse the workings of race hierarchy in Martinique,7 the
island where he was born and spent the first years of his life and refers to
the attempt made by black people to become more white through mar-
riages with lighter-skin people. Fanon’s work is contextually interesting
in so far as Black Skin, White Masks was written in 1952 and draws on
Fanon’s experience after the Second World War, which is precisely the
context of first generation immigrants of Andrea Levy’s novels, whose
discourse influences the outlook of their children, the second gener-
ation immigrants we are dealing with here. There is something specific
to the situation of immigrants from the West Indies after the Second
World War. Their hesitations, oscillations and vacillations between a
wish to assert their difference and their tendency to let colonial dis-
course determine them is very specific to this period, when Blackness
was only starting to emerge as a powerful voice, as Gilroy explains in
the following passage. Unlike their parents who did not have an iden-
tity already available as part of the Black diaspora in the UK, their chil-
dren could rely on a newly constituted discourse.
The issue of identity and non-identity of black cultures has acquired

a special historical and political significance in Britain. Black settle-
ment in that country goes back many centuries, and affirming its
continuity has become an important part of the politics that strive
to answer contemporary British racism. However, the bulk of today’s
black communities are of relatively recent origin, dating only from
the post-World War II period. If these populations are unified at all,

it is more by the experience of migration than by the memory of
slavery and the residues of plantation society. Until recently, this
very newness and conspicuous lack of rootedness in the ‘indigenous’
cultures of Britain’s inner cities conditioned the formation of racial
subcultures which drew heavily from a range of ‘raw materials’ sup-
plied by the Caribbean and black America. (Gilroy, 1993, 81)
And as Stuart Hall explains, this Caribbean diaspora manufactured an

identity for itself, an identity made of bits and pieces, of fragments of
history and long-forgotten traditions so as to share not only some sense
of common identity derived from the experience of immigration, but
a deeper sense of identity, which could be mapped and had its roots
in Africa and emerged as the process of a cross-fertilization between
Africa, the United States and the Caribbean, which is very similar to
what Stuart Hall describes:
When I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s as a child in Kingston,

I was surrounded by the signs, music and rhythms of this Africa of
the diaspora, which only existed as a result of a long and discontinu-
ous series of transformations. But, although almost everyone around
me was some shade of dark or brown or black, [...] I never once heard
a single person refer to themselves or to others as, in some way, or
as having been at some time in the past ‘African.’ It was only in the
1970s that this Afro-Caribbean identity became historically avail-
able to the great majority of Jamaican people, at home and abroad.
In this historic moment, Jamaicans discovered themselves to be
‘black’ – just as, in the same moment, they discovered themselves to
be the sons and daughters of slavery. (Hall, 1990, 231)
Although she is not technically a second generation immigrant, since

her mother never left Jamaica, Constance in Fruit of the Lemon provides
an interesting case in point illustrating how children find themselves
caught in the power struggle fought by their parents and are instrumen-
talized to carry on their parents’ identity struggle. Born into a mixed
marriage, Constance is dearly loved by her mother because, with her
white sandy hair and her light-coloured skin, she is a ‘pass-for-white
child’ (307). In other words, her whiteness corresponds to what her
mother has always dreamt of. In a context dominated by British suprem-
acy, her mother did not choose to rebel but accepted all forms of colonial
domination and the way she raised her child, in complete compliance
with the principles of British culture, is proof of her complete denial of

her own culture and acceptance of Western discourse on blackness. As
a child, Constance is sent to England to acquire a proper English educa-
tion and to learn to do things ‘the way the English do them’. Over the
years, Constance learns to speak with a perfect RP accent and the irony
is that the more English her accent becomes, the more difficulties her
mother has to understand what her daughter is saying (315).
Yet if her mother has reached her goal and has managed to ‘whiten’
her lineage, Constance suffers from a loss of bearings and longs to recon-
nect with the country of her birth. After finishing school, she returns to
Jamaica where she hopes to settle. Constance’s life story is marked by a
long series of rejections. Because she feels too white, Constance decides
to become a Rastafarian and quits her job to go and live in a Rastafarian
community. By having a child with a Rastafarian, she symbolically tries
to undo the ‘whitening process’ undertaken by her mother. Yet to her
dismay, the child is caramel-coloured with sandy hair and his father
rejects both of them because the child is not black enough. Constance’s
desperate attempt to find somewhere to fit in leads her all the way to
Africa where she travels with a group of tourists from Jamaica. But as
expected, they call her ‘the white woman’ behind her back. To cut a
long story short, Constance’s life is one long series of desperate attempts
to be a black woman despite her white skin. The more she feels alien-
ated from what she considers her culture, the more markers of iden-
tity she tries to acquire, resorting to a reconstructed authenticity which
she hopes can free her of her in-betweenness. For example, she takes
to wearing African dresses and hairdos and even changes her name to
Afria, a name evidently very close to Africa. In a way, Constance tries
to ‘blacken’ herself, in a manner similar to the way some blacks attempt
to whiten themselves.
The diachronic perspective on identity redefinition through three
generations points to the contextual change from a generation of
Jamaicans who looked up to England, to one which vindicates the right
to be black. The novel provides a very good illustration of Fanon’s idea
that race is never only about race but about a balance of power and
that the same discursive category ‘black’ is submitted to a temporality
which connotes it differently, slightly displacing the frontier between
‘self’ and ‘other.’ ‘Black’ at the beginning of the novel has a different
meaning from the same signifier at the end, after it has been redefined
in more positive terms by the Rastafarians.
The last point I would like to discuss is the way in which Levy
also describes the predicament of second generation immigrants as
characterized by what could be called ‘second-hand colonization.’ In

Fruit of the Lemon, Faith’s itinerary leads her from a total absence of
race awareness to a delayed discovery of colonial domination, which
impacts on her all the more violently as she had no knowledge of her
family’s history. When she first sets foot in Jamaica, Faith is preju-
diced against Jamaicans and seems to have endorsed the superior
and condescending discourse of the West. At the end of the novel
however, her transformation process and her diaspora-ization (Hall,
1988, 30) result in her identification with the subaltern status of
Jamaicans as a colonized people. This identification becomes obvi-
ous in the episode when Faith learns about the unknown history of
Nelson’s other wife, the black wife ‘who nursed and tended him in
ill health’ (323), ‘not the wife of [my] English history lessons’ (323).
Andrea Levy unearths this erased layer of past history, which the
colonists have scrubbed out in order to write their own version, and
revives it, for example when Faith recounts her visit to the fort and
when a relative shares her memories of the paternalistic discourse of
the ‘Mother Country.’
When I was a girl – a little girl – I used to be so proud that we were

part of the British Empire. England was our Mother Country. That’s
what we called it. My teacher at school used to say, ‘England is the
Mother Country and we ...’ and she would run her finger round the
room pointing at every one us ... ‘we are all the Mother Country’s
children.’ (326)
Unlike colonized people, who have experienced the propaganda of

colonial discourse first hand, like her relatives in Jamaica, Faith sim-
ultaneously finds new bearings in the discovery of her family’s history
while being almost immediately dispossessed of them on learning of
the colonial past.8 It is in this sense that Faith’s quest for identity as a
‘second generation immigrant’ leads her to experience a form of ‘second
hand colonization.’9
Through the opening up of the focus to the heroine’s Jamaican
relatives as well as through the introduction of a chronological per-
spective on the redefinition of race relations, Andrea Levy’s novel not
only maps the reconfiguration of race relations between Britain and
its others, it also opens onto a larger reflection on the rigidity of such
fixed paradigms as the bipolar one we discussed in Chapter 1. Indeed,
Levy explores the complexities of the middle ground, where the frontier
between ‘self’ and ‘other’ is constantly displaced, but also where these
reconfigurations challenge the stability of the poles themselves, ques-

tion their supremacy as sole referents and their authenticity.
Another novel which questions such rigid polarities through a focus
on the availability of ethnic role models and of a set of references
through which in-betweeners can express their interstitiality is Gish
Jen’s novel Mona in the Promised Land. Set in a different context, that of
the United States ‘at the dawn of the civil rights movement’, the novel
poses the question of interstitiality in very different terms. Among
the reasons for such different approaches is not only the fact that the
minorities involved are different. The site of reinvention and legitimiza-
tion of mixed identities is also different since the novel is not set in the
UK but in the American melting pot.
The melting pot definition in crisis: Mona in The Promised

Land by Gish Jen
In Gish Jen’s novel Mona in the Promised Land10 it becomes apparent at

an early stage that the values of the ‘promised land,’ namely the United
States, are not fully endorsed and that the title is to be read as ironic.
Indeed, the term ‘promised land’ is multi-referential and refers not only
to the biblical episode, but also to the staging of American identity as
almost mythical. The protagonist’s quest for identity is constantly pre-
sent at two levels, that of the parody, as well as more serious undertones.
Although it revolves around the theme of a young Chinese American
girl’s crisis of adolescence and her quest for identity, it is set against the
background of the American melting pot and its complex metamor-
phosis at the dawn of the civil rights movement (the novel actually
starts in 1968, when Mona’s family settle in Scarshill) in the days of ‘the
blushing dawn of ethnic awareness’ (3).
The two poles in the debates around identity we discussed in the pre-
vious section are reassessed in a critical way. Authenticity is dismissed
as a construct created by the West to exoticize China, and all the stereo-
types linked to China and Asian immigrants are immediately rejected,
for example when Jen underlines that Mona does not drink Ginseng tea
but prefers milkshakes. Besides, unlike Constance in Fruit of the Lemon
who sought comfort in the Rastafarian ethos and subculture, Mona is
aware of the lack of Asian American role models. Neither the pure nor
the authentic are here to provide some sense of belonging, any more
than the combining of identities. As Michael Fischer has put it, ‘to be
Chinese-American is not the same thing as being Chinese in America.
In this sense there is no role model for becoming Chinese-American. It
is a matter of finding a voice or style that does not violate one’s several
components of identity’ (Fischer in Clifford and Marcus, 1986, 196).
Despite the light tone of the narrative, there is more to Mona’s iden-
tity crisis than a tale of a teenager who witnesses the first signs of
puberty. Mona’s problem is precisely the opposite; she does not wit-
ness any change in her body when those of her friends start changing
dramatically, thereby stressing the racial difference between her Asian
body and that of her friend Barbara:
But she doesn’t look like, say, Barbara.[...] Barbara’s is the body Mona
is still waiting to grow into. Her breasts, for example, are veritable
colonies of herself, with a distinct tendency toward independence.
Whereas Mona’s, in contrast, are anything but wayward. A scant
handful of each, hers are smooth and innocent – the result, you
might think, of eating too much ice cream. They meld into the fat
under her arms. [...] How can she let her legs go natural when they
already are natural? [...] She feels condemned to be straight and nar-
row. [...] She will one day discover that it is great to be nonhairy. [...]
Plus that she is yellow and beautiful – baby boobs, hammy calves,
and all. (75–6)
The lexical field of colonization and power struggle hence points to

an underlying crisis which has its roots in racial difference and a lack of
Asian American role models.
Gish Jen’s narrative treatment of Mona’s identity is one of the most
interesting and complex aspects of the novel and invites us to reflect on
the possibility of apprehending identity independently of an embodied
form of identity and of a racially constructed identity. The collusion
between these categories is all the more paradoxical as Mona advocates
a conception of identity as chosen, changeable rather than as fixed and
given once and for all. As she had explained to her 8th grade crush,
Sherman Matsumoto, her friend from Japan, it is possible to switch and
take on a new identity. Jewish identity hence enters the picture, although
it does not receive the treatment it deserves as I shall argue later:
‘Of course I like it here, I was born here,’ Mona says. ‘Is Mona Jewish?’
She laughs. ‘Oy!’ ‘Is she American?’ ‘Sure I’m American,’ Mona says.
‘Everybody who’s born here is American, and also some people who
convert from what they were before. You could become American.’
But he says no, he could never. ‘Sure you could,’ Mona says. ‘You only
have to learn some rules and speeches.’ ‘But I Japanese.’ (14)
Yet if Mona envisages identity independently of race, the passage

recounting her work for the temple hotline offers another perspective
on the way she relates to identity and in particular to that of others.
One of the callers reminds Mona of Sherman Matsumoto. Mona, who
is intrigued by this disembodied voice feels the need to reconstruct the
body around the voice. But as she starts to interpret the hints he gives
her, she reconstructs a body which is racialized. Moreover, her inter-
pretation is based on clichés and stereotypes borrowed from race-based
and even racist discourse:
Japanese (?) male calling for (is this prejudiced?) somewhat inscrutable
but probably profound reasons. Although who knows, maybe also/just for
language practice (English) [...] Given caller’s depressed state of mind, prob-
ably ought also to have explored caller attitude toward hari-kiri, even if
that’s a stereotype. (70) (Italics in the text)
In a stimulating article entitled ‘Mona on the phone: the performative

body and racial identity in Mona in the Promised Land’ Erika T. Lin ana-
lyses the double movement which consists in resorting to stereotypes
and at the same time undermining the racist discourse that underpins
them, using the notion of hyperbolic citation,11 which she borrows from
Judith Butler (Butler, 1993, 232). The passage I have quoted shows how
Mona cannot help resorting to constructed racialized representations of
the body and at the same time the discourse these representations ori-
ginate in is presented as racist. By overdoing them, to the point where
they almost self-parody, Gish Jen also undermines them. Gish Jen thus
foregrounds the paradox of identity construction and shows how dif-
ficult it is to envisage and shape one’s identity independently of the
category of race – race as socially constructed through discourse. This
difficulty is hinted at in the contradiction between Mona’s discourse –
which posits the possibility for everyone to choose a new identity inde-
pendently of their race or place of birth – and her need to reconstruct
the disembodied other so as to interact with him in the codified realm
of clearly established identity definitions.
The novel does not only deal with the identity crises of teenagers
craving bearings in the American melting pot but raises the broader
issue of race relations, of the image each community has of other eth-
nic groups and of their place in what is perceived as a hierarchy of the
different communities. The very first page of the novel introduces this
issue when we read that the Chinese are ‘the New Jews [...] a model
minority and Great American Success’ (3). This statement, which is later
qualified, points to the complex balance of power between the different

components of the American melting pot presented here as a pyramid
rather than as a continuum where all the communities enjoy the same
status and living conditions, a situation the Changs are probably not
aware of:
They know they belong in the promised land. Or do they? In fact,

it’s only 1968; the blushing dawn of ethnic awareness has yet to pink
up their inky suburban night. They have an idea about the blacks
because of poor Martin Luther King. More distantly perceived is that
the Jews have become the Jews on account of the Six Day War; much
less that they, the Changs, are The New Jews. (3)
This passage points at the specificity of the American context which

is not a case of mainstream culture versus diasporic communities but
rather of a loose mosaic of communities framed by or lost in the larger
mainstream society. Incidentally, the layout of the city of New York, as
it is presented in the opening passage of the novel clearly expresses the
idea that as you become more successful and climb up the social ladder
you move to a new neighbourhood, and this move is described in terms
of a progress similar to the frontier.
They are just smitten with the educational opportunity before them –
that golden student-teacher ratio – and also with the dumb majesty
of the landscaping. Three giant azaleas they have now, not to say
a rhododendron the size of their old bathroom, and in addition, a
topographical feature of forsythia. Two foothills of the forsythia,
they are moved to address immediately with hedge clippers (feeling
quite hardy and pioneering, Westward ho! And all that), only to dis-
cover that to render your forsythia into little can shapes in this town
is considered gauche. (3–4)
This passage, which describes the Changs’ promised plot of land, com-
bines references to several founding myths of America like the garden
of Eden, the land of plenty, the frontier and the settlement. It is as if the
Changs, who are successful in the race for success, had become more
American by appropriating the dreams of the host country and being
part of its mythology in the making.
It is in this context, when Chinese immigrants start to weigh heavier
in the scales that the novel is set, which leads Mona’s parents to dis-
agree on an important issue: should they mark their difference or try
and blend in, for it may well be that one day they will be less conspicu-
ous than other, more visible minorities. ‘This is Mona’s theory about
her parents: that Ralph thought they should live in their own little
world, whereas Helen thought they should be a minority, though, and
especially an outspoken one.’ (52). Interestingly enough, this idea that
minorities eventually blend into the American melting pot is not unlike
what Philip Roth said in an interview I cited in Chapter 2. And in the
case of the Chinese community, it turned out to be true.
Another point I would like to raise concerns Mona’s original solution
to her identity crisis, which is to convert to Judaism. Gish Jen herself
has suggested that the book has gone too far in some respects but not
far enough in others (Jen in Hanis, 1996). It seems to me that the ques-
tion of Jewish identity could have been developed in a more convincing
way, not as one of Mona’s whimsical ideas but as a paradigm of identity
definition. The question of the Jewish experience defined as paradigm
for identity has been a moot point for a number of years and has led to
heated debates between those who think that the Jewish condition is an
interesting prism through which to articulate and transcend race, cul-
ture, and languages (Bloom, 1999), and those who criticize it (Steiner,
1998)12 for fear that it may lead to an instrumentalization of Jewish
identity. However, for Mona and her friends, becoming Jewish is seen
more in terms of freedom, the freedom to take on an identity which
you may choose to hide or claim, which is less ‘marked’ (racially speak-
ing) and yet which allows you to assert your right to be different. Naive
though it may seem – and actually is – Mona’s definition of identity is
a distorted representation of the agenda of the American dream where
one can supposedly become whatever one chooses and where ‘con-
sent’ prevails over ‘descent,’ to draw on the terminological distinction
advanced by Werner Sollors (Sollors, 1986). But for Mona, being Jewish
is also synonymous with an inclusive identity rather than an exclusive
one: ‘Jewish is American,’ Mona says. ‘American means being whatever
you want and I happen to pick being Jewish.’ (49) Despite the novel’s
optimism, Gish Jen suggests a rather pessimistic vision of the American
melting pot, for in Mona communities follow different agendas and
interaction between them is superficial and illusory.
Prior to closing this discussion of Mona, I would like to return to
Gish Jen’s critical stance with respect to the American melting pot.
Mona touches upon one of the great paradoxes of the American con-
text and shows that the vindication of identity has crystallized around
the notion of ethnicity, and has been strengthened by identity pol-
itics. At the same time, identity politics has contributed to a sort of
lapse back to community-oriented politics and a sort of ghettoization

of identities, a phenomenon which has started to come under criti-
cism.13 At the end of the novel, Mona, who sees more clearly into the
power structures and race relations than in her early teens realizes
that whereas she believes that all communities are on an equal foot-
ing, her parents are community-oriented and would rather hire an
Asian employee than a black one. She also understands that they have
fired Alfred because he is black, which validates the discourse on black
oppression.
The squad has helped Alfred find a new place; they’ve helped him
find a new car. He doesn’t have to stay with some white folk like a
charity case.
‘We shall have our manhood’, quotes the Estimator. ‘We shall have it
or the earth will be levelled by our attempts to gain it.’
‘What’s this ‘we?’ says Seth. (205)
The Estimator’s speech (Alfred’s Black friend) takes up the agenda of the
Black panthers and gives a new meaning to the personal pronoun ‘we’:
it no longer refers to the collective ‘we’ implied by multiculturalism, in
which Mona and her friends believe – but to the members of specific
communities who chose to cater for themselves. If the novel ends on
a rather positive note, with an image of mixity suggested by Mona’s
marriage with Seth and their having a child, the situation is far from
satisfactory and suggests a bitter acknowledgement of the failure of the
American melting pot which threatens to become a salad bowl.
Double diasporas and identity: The In-Between World of

Vikram Lall by M.G. Vassanji
Another complex example of how national identity and the very

notion of nation are challenged by diasporic populations is the case of
double diasporas or in other words of second generation immigrants
who become im/migrants themselves. Their case combines the ten-
sion between their parents’ experience of immigration often lived as
exile and their own in-betweenness, divided as they are between three
countries – the country of origin which is also that of their ethnicity,
the country of their birth and first belonging, in which they may have
already felt alienated, and the host country, divorced from ethnicity
and sometimes from a deeper sense of belonging.
The case of Moyez Vassanji14 provides an interesting example which

points to the difficulty involved in mapping the diasporas of the
Anglophone world and apprehending interstitiality in situations as
complex as double diasporas. Born into a family of Indian origin and
raised in Tanzania, Vassanji later moved to Canada where he still lives.
As such, he is a good example of the twice displaced. Although he has
spent most of his adult life in Canada, Kenya remains a powerful pres-
ence for him psychologically, and to some extent his reason for writing
as he explained in an interview with Susheila Nasta.
I live in Canada and at some point I felt a tremendous sense of loss

at being away from the place I grew up in, and what I did was try to
recreate the life that we lived. But I think a more important motive
perhaps is that that life has never been lived ... I mean never been
written about. It’s something that is slowly being wiped out, and as
the people who’ve experienced that life die off, then there’s no more
record of that life. (Vassanji in Nasta, 2004, 70)
Despite his parents’ attachment to Indian culture and the fact that he
was brought up as an Indian boy with close links with the Asian commu-
nity, Vassanji considers Kenya home. In other words, his idea of home is
neither where he now lives nor where his family originally came from,
but where he grew up. Moreover, for him, there seems to be no contra-
diction between being of Indian origin and considering Kenya as home,
which suggests the possibility of double belonging as well as the idea
that identity is not exclusive and rooted only in one culture.
Unlike his grandfather who grew up in India and experienced the
unsettling experience of immigration and displacement with the know-
ledge that there is a place where he belongs, Vassanji, like Vikram, the
protagonist of The In-Between World of Vikram Lall does not have a place
he can go back to, hence his need to create such a place of origin in
writing. For him writing is a way of immortalizing the life of the twice
displaced who grew up as foreigners in the country of their birth and
found themselves uprooted before they even had a chance to cast their
roots in East Africa. It is also a way of giving some kind of official exist-
ence to a hyphenated population, the Asian immigrants, who did not
find their place in the grand narrative of colonialism any more than
they did in the anti-colonial struggle and whose twice peripheral life in
Africa was likely to be forgotten after they left the country.15
Much of the interest of the novel lies in the handling of the character
of Vikram Lall and his kaleidoscopic identity torn between his cultural
heritage and his experience in Africa. His case invites a profound inter-
rogation of what exactly constitutes identity; is it ethnicity, origins or
experience? Although he was born into a family of Asian immigrants
who try to cling to their traditions and habits and remain Indians away
from India, Vikram grew up in Kenya and has never been to India. To
him the very thought of having to go visit his parents’ home country is
awe-inspiring and his childhood memories include gruesome anecdotes
of life in India like his father’s story of sitting in a cab whose back seat
was covered in excrement. There is a fundamental difference between
the way Vikram and the way his parents relate to Kenya, in particular
his mother who thinks of her life away from her home country as exile
rather than immigration. Born and bred in Peshawar, which became a
Pakistani town after the partition, Mrs Lall knows that she cannot go
back to her home city and lives her life in Kenya as if it were some kind
of exile.
When Rama’s exile was the subject of the stories, it was never far
from our consciousness that Mother and her brother shared a deep
sense of exile from their birthplace, Peshawar, a city they would
never be able to see again because it had been lost to Pakistan. And
since Peshawar was the ancestral home also of my dada Anand Lall,
the rest of our family could somehow share in that exile, though not
with the same intensity. (93)
While the experience of Vikram’s parents is rendered painful by the

sense of exile, that of Vikram is traumatic because of the absence of
bearings, both affective and intellectual. Unlike his mother who feels
as though she had lost her homeland, Vic does not know where he
belongs. The narrative of his childhood years is interspersed with refer-
ences to his sense of unbelonging and his awareness of the importance
of ethnicity. For Vic, his friend Njoroge will always be ‘more African
than him,’ as if his child’s perspective on issues of identity had already
taken on board the fact that there is a continuity between country,
ethnicity and identity. Vic’s sense of difference is exacerbated by the
context – he grows up in the days leading up to the independence of
Kenya – at a time when the definition of identity crystallizes around
ethnicity.
I do recall that being different, in features, in status, was not far from
my consciousness. I was also aware that he was more from Africa
than I was. He was African, I was Asian. I was smaller, with pointed
elvish ears, my skin annoyingly ‘medium’ as I described it then, nei-

ther one (white) nor the other (black). (27)
This awareness of the importance of ethnicity as one of the compo-

nents of identity is also expressed rather explicitly through references
to Vic’s fantasy of being related to an African woman. At the age when
children fancy themselves as the illegitimate children of other parents,
Vic reinvents a more African identity and starts fabulating over his
father’s potential affair with an African woman. In other words, he tries
to make up for his absence of African origins by inventing an imagined
lineage which ‘blackens’ him.
Because of my dada and dadi’s close connection to the Molabuxes,

I have often seen an affinity between myself and the Masai. I have
even fantasized that Dada, perhaps sought comfort with a woman of
that people, perhaps she had his child and I have cousins in some of
the manyattas of the plains. There is no proof anything like this ever
happened – and my fantasy has partly to do with desperate need to
belong to the land I was born in – but it’s not impossible either. (67)
Another reason for Vic’s existential interrogations is the sense that as a

child of Indian origin, he is not part of a grand narrative, whether it be
the narrative of colonization or that of resistance and nationalist strug-
gle against colonization. While both his friends William and Njoroge
have narratives they can relate to, Vikram laments the lack of heroes
he can use as role models. Although his mother points out that they do
have heroes, the heroes of the Ramayan, Vic remains sceptical. Hence
the importance of the episode of his discovery of pictures representing
members of his family. The fact that they are visual signifiers without a
written narrative provides room for invention and even a certain poetic
licence; they are fragments of an unwritten narrative waiting for a com-
petent narrator which he ventures to become. The following extract
shows how Vic produces an epic in which Asians are the heroes, a nar-
rative of life on the frontier which celebrates the courage of these men
and exaggerates the hardships they have been through.
Our people had sweated on it, had died on it; they had been car-
ried away in their weary sleep or even wide awake by man-eating
lions of magical ferocity and cunning, crushed under avalanches
of blasted rock, speared and macheted as proxies of the whites by
angry Kamba, Kikuyu, and Nandi warriors, infected with malaria,
sleeping sickness, elephantiasis, cholera; bitten by jiggers, scorpions,

snakes, and chameleons; and wounded in vicious fights with each
other. (17)
The fact that his family helped build railway lines in itself is note-
worthy for it is a form of settlement which is not rooted in the land
and yet allows the land to be explored, while at the same time symbol-
izing their relation to the British Empire and their role as instruments
in the expansion of their territories. Although Vikram delights in the
contemplation of the picture of his grandfather, he has some awareness
that some of the things he was told by his parents may well be untrue
(‘I don’t know if such rails ever existed, with the Punjabi signatures
upon them, but myth is more powerful than factual evidence, and in
its way surely far truer’, 16). Yet whether or not they actually existed,
these signatures have become part of a collective imaginary and as such
have become as real as reality itself for they have become instrumental
in the shaping of their collective identity as Asian immigrants. In this
sense we can say that although Vassanji often stresses the need to write
history, his books are not limited to a factual rendering of established
episodes; much of their interest lies in their understanding of the role
of self-representation. Vikram even imagines a second photograph, an
imaginary one which emerges as the first one – the real photograph –
recedes to the background. This second photograph which is obviously
a materialization of Vic’s fantasies represents his grandfather, no longer
as a reserved character, a frail man in an awkward posture, but as a set-
tler who contemplates the landscape as if he owned the land, and as if
this land had become his new home.
I imagine him six years later, at the end of his second contract, seated
atop a small pyramid of steel sleepers at the Nakuru railway yard,
with a companion or two perhaps, chewing on a blade of grass or
lunching on daal and rice from the canteen. [...] I see this turbaned
young Indian who would be my dada saying to himself, This valley
has a beauty to surpass even the god Shivji’s Kashmir, and the cool
weather in May is so akin to the winters of Peshawar... (18)
Unlike the imaginary tale of his imaginary African mother, this narra-
tive of successful settlement allows Vic to find some sense of belonging,
as well as providing a paradigm for identity construction in the case
of double diasporas, one which lies in the ability to bear witness to
their presence in a new land and to the family’s imprint upon the land.
The role of the narratives, which is stressed by Vassanji through his

descriptions of Vic’s imaginative reconstruction of the past, points at
the intentionality of identity in the case of diasporas, and especially in
that of double diasporas, as well as the need to recreate a certain sense
of continuity in writing. But his novel also prompts certain questions
as to the writing of national narratives of identity and of official his-
tory. Indeed, the fact that the Gikuyus are always referred to as ‘traitors’
poses the question of the complicity between the narrative voice and
Britain’s take on the history of Kenya.
Despite the breadth of the contextual spectrum encompassed by such
diverse novels as Fruit of the Lemon, Mona in the Promised Land and The
In-Between World of Vikram Lall, the literary triptych which has served
as a cornerstone to this chapter provides a case in point and shows the
limitations of the mutually exclusive polarities we discussed in the
introductory section, such as authenticity and the postmodern take on
identity as construction. There is even a sense in which they provide
very good illustrations of liminality as a multipolar site and somehow
flesh out some of the arguments we discussed in Chapter 1, in particu-
lar in relation to the necessary move away from bipolar paradigms to
an emphasis on the middle ground. This shift in focus, which has to a
large extent been initiated by Gilroy in The Black Atlantic, has paved the
way for further explorations and investigations into the rhizomorphic
structure of international formation and the intricacies of the lines of
segmentarity.
This recentering in from the poles themselves to the intermediate
locus invalidates the rigidity of binaries and dichotomies, and to a cer-
tain extent of frameworks based on such fixed dual positions, which as
Deleuze and Guattari have eloquently argued have become untenable:
Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is

stratified, territorialised, organised, signified, attributed, etc., as well
as lines of deterritorialisation down which it constantly flees. There
is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into
a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These
lines always tie back to one another. That is why one can never posit
a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of good and
bad. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980 [1987] 9)
Another consequence of this interrogation and indictment of the

alignment land/race/culture, which Gilroy has rejected independently
of the political situatedness of such clusters – jettisoning Afrocentrism
along with Eurocentrism – is the move away from originary referents,

such as Britain or Africa. There is a sense in which his emphasis on trans-
national subjectivity has somehow paved the way for more recent trans-
national models. However, if his approach has undeniably unlocked the
ethno-racial foundations of the nation, it would appear that he has lost
the verticality inherent to national grounding and consequently the
political dimension implied by social stratification.
4
Shaky Ground, New Territorialities
and the Diasporic Subject
Diasporic literature is a literature of remembering, not only in the usual

sense of the term – a literature geared towards the past, haunted by the
lost country and pervaded with a general sense of nostalgia. It is also a
literature of re-membering which unearths fragments of the past, pieces
them together, or fails to do so, altering the perspective, exaggerating
the importance of certain events or, on the other hand, toning them
down, thus creating an ‘imaginary homeland’ (Rushdie, 1991). It is in
this sense that in his book Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie has
defined the specificity of the diasporic writer as someone who recap-
tures the homeland after the break and from an outside perspective;
the diasporic writer’s perception may be fragmentary, but this fragmen-
tation makes the process of recollection more intense and the fragment
excavated from the past more meaningful and emblematic. And because
he is not too close to the scene he is describing, the diasporic writer may
gain a better perspective on things:
It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatri-

ates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look
back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we
do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge – which gives
rise to profound uncertainties – that our physical alienation from
India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaim-
ing precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create
fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary
homelands, Indias of the mind.
Writing my book in North London, looking out through my win-
dow on to a city scene totally unlike the ones I was imagining on to
paper, I was constantly plagued by this problem, until I felt obliged
75
to face it in the text, to make clear that (in spite of my original and
I suppose somewhat Proustian ambition to unlock the gates of lost
time so that the past reappeared as it actually had been unaffected
by the distortions of memory), so that my India was just that: ‘my’
India, a version and no more than one version of all the hundreds of
millions of possible versions. I tried to make it as imaginatively true
as I could, but imaginative truth is simultaneously honourable and
suspect, and I knew that my India may only have been one to which
I (who am no longer what I was, and who by quitting Bombay never
became what perhaps I was meant to be) was, let us say, willing to
admit I belonged.
This is why I made my narrator, Saleem, suspect in his narration;
his mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory compounded by
quirks of character and circumstance, and his vision is fragmentary.
It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India
tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors,
some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost. (Rushdie,
1991, 10)
Rushdie’s idea of diasporic literature does not imply that diasporic lit-
erature should be considered as merely fictional and severed from real-
ity; after all, ‘the broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one
which is supposedly unflawed’, Rushdie adds (Rushdie, 1991, 11). But it
shows a certain awareness of the limitations of the diasporic perspec-
tive, at once less up-to-date but still accurate, a ‘long geographical per-
spective’ (Rushdie, 15).
Rushdie’s definition offers an interesting alternative to existing def-
initions stressing the archaeological dimension of diasporic literature
as unearthing and preserving fragments of the past. Among them is
Vijay Mishra’s notion of the ‘fossilization’ of the mother country (to
him, diasporic literature is a ‘fossilized’ fragment of an original nation
that seeks renewal through a ‘refossilization’ of itself (Mishra in Nelson
1992, 4)). We can also think of Emmanuel Nelson’s idea of an ‘aesthetics
of reworlding’:
At the core of all diasporic fictions, is the haunting presence of

India – and the anguish of personal loss it represents. It is precisely
this shared experience of absence that engenders an aesthetics of
reworlding that informs and unites the literature of the Indian
diaspora. (Nelson, 1992, XV–XVI)
Shaky Ground, Territorialities and Diasporic Subject 77
Such definitions of diasporic literature pose two kinds of problems.

The first has to do with their inappropriateness when it comes to dis-
cussing contemporary texts in which the ‘subtext of home’ (Brah, 1996,
190) is still present, albeit sometimes less vividly than in earlier novels,
and where the host country emerges in more forceful contours. Equally
problematic is the notion of ossification underlying the concept of ‘fos-
silization,’ which suggests that the motherland has remained the same,
pristine and unchanged, as if removed from history.
Although the last years have seen the development of homecoming
narratives (Monica Ali, Kiran Desai, Abdulrazak Gurnah, M.G. Vassanji),1
which seem to confirm Mishra’s idea of fossilization and longing for the
past, such texts also engage with contemporary issues; they are not past-
oriented but incredibly timely in the concerns they voice as well as in
the representations they sketch of the new world geography. Not only do
they reflect changes in the contemporary world, which the im/migrant,
as an embodiment of mobility, is among the first to notice, they also
interrogate the validity of postmodern myths linked to mobility and
migration, as well as the more popular doxa derived from notions devel-
oped by sociologists or geographers, like the idea that the world has
become a global village (McLuhan, 1964), increasingly characterized by
a ‘compression of time and space’ (Harvey, 2000). As literary texts, they
are particularly sensitive to the role and power of language to influence
im/migrants, as well as to the impact of representations. In other words,
the imaginary geography of changing territorialities they sketch, not
only provides room for nostalgic recollections but works as an incentive
to interrogate postmodern myths linked to territoriality and mobility,
precisely because the vantage point of diasporic literature works as an
epistemological node where myths converge, clash and sometimes self-
destroy, thereby laying bare their underlying strategies.
The question of the diasporic subject and the contemporary world
geography needs to be recontextualized in various ways. If language
and discourse are central to it, there are several patterns of interaction.
In the first section of this chapter I propose to analyse how the represen-
tation of the homeland and of the host country are not only shaped by
nostalgia and affected by the haunting presence of the home country
but are also caught in a convergence of discourses which not necessar-
ily clash but merge into a pattern of confluence. Hence the colonial
representation of India as exotic and pristine is taken up by the dis-
course of heritage culture (Harvey) and rechannelled, producing a new
India tailored for the West and often debunked by diasporic writers.
Another pattern is the disjunctive one which brings into tension myths
and narratives of failed integration. Such myths and narratives expose
the disjunction and dissonance between Western discourse and the
actual experience of the diasporic subject.
The role of language, which I propose to concentrate on in the
last section of this chapter, is all the more important as in recent
years, some anthropologists and sociologists have resorted to meta-
phors to describe recent changes in the new world geography, like
Zygmunt Bauman who has devoted a large part of his work to study-
ing the workings of the ‘liquid modern times’ we live in. They have
also openly addressed the role and impact of language in the shap-
ing of new territorialities, bringing physical geography and human
geography closer together. This move does not originate in the idio-
syncrasy of language-loving sociologists, but reflects a new fact of
contemporary life: that our experience is less and less original – in
the sense of first hand – and is increasingly supplanted by previous
knowledge conveyed though discourse and disseminated thanks to
the growth of communication technologies (Appadurai, 1996). The
last section of this chapter will focus on two aspects of these develop-
ments, the role of language in the reconfiguration of space and the
coming together of new communities, and the process of re-encoding
at work in language and its political implications. The first part of the
discussion draws on the analysis of ‘non-places’ by Marc Augé, which
I propose to use as an entry point to analyse Hari Kunzru’s novel
Transmission, and in particular the forming of virtual communities
which do not originate in geographic continuity and physical prox-
imity but in language. In Non-Places, Introduction to an Anthropology
of Supermodernity, Marc Augé has analysed the role of language in
the creation of the transitional places of supermodernity where lan-
guage is omnipresent and takes the place of human beings, but where
it also creates a parallel world made of virtual places, which oper-
ate independently of actual geography, in and through language.
This discussion of the role of language will then lead me to focus
more specifically on the political role played by languages in terms
of re-encoding. This particular point, which draws on Deleuze and
Guattari’s analysis of deterritorialization and the fluxes of capital-
ism aims at showing how language operates along similar lines, in
particular when notions such as mobility are being redefined by the
logic of global capitalism. In recent years for example, the notion of
mobility has increasingly become equated with geographic mobility
rather than with social mobility.
From colonialism to heritage culture:

the paradigm of the snowglobe
In the introduction to this section I have referred to Vijay Mishra’s idea

of the ‘fossilization’ of the nation, which to him is a constitutive feature
of a large body of texts from the South Asian diaspora. In recent years,
there has been a proliferation of motifs evoking fossilization in the sense
meant by Mishra: a need to preserve and protect India, which originates
in a sense of loss and nostalgia for the lost country. Images like chutney
or pickle jars for example, in Arundhati Roy’s prize-winning novel The
God of Small Things (1997), express the need to preserve Indian flavours.
But these images are more ambiguous than they seem as the carefully
packaged pickles also suggest that India is ready to be consumed.
In this section I propose to address the issues of preservation, fossil-
ization and nostalgia in slightly different terms and with the help of a
different critical framework, shifting the emphasis from the diasporic
subject as the sole producer of representations of the lost country, to the
country itself, which is represented in these imaginary geographies as
being at the centre of a cluster of influences. Among them is colonial-
ism, or rather its avatars, for as some critics have rightly pointed out, the
East is still preyed upon by the West, as the Indo-chic fashion described
by Padmini Mongia seems to indicate (Mongia, 1997). Mongia herself
has accused Arundhati Roy of surfing the Indo-chic wave and produ-
cing an India tailored for the West. But beyond this ‘marketing of the
margins’ (Huggan, 2001), there is also a certain form of what Marxist
geographer David Harvey has termed ‘Heritage Culture’ (Harvey, 1989)
after Hewinson’s notion of ‘heritage industry’ (Hewinson, 1987)2 – a
sort of profit-oriented recreation of a culture swallowed and erased by
colonialism or capitalism. As Graham Huggan has remarked in his book
Marketing the Margins, ‘Indo-chic’, and Roy’s contribution to it, are not
simply to be seen as naive Western constructs; they are products of the
globalization of Western-capitalist consumer culture, in which ‘India’
functions not just as ‘a polyvalent cultural sign but as a highly mobile
capital good’ (Huggan, 2001, 67).
The idea of a postmodern, post-industrial3 recreation of authenticity
with a view to making profit has proved quite insightful and beneficial
to discussion of how space is reinvented by postmodernity, which pro-
duces simulacra of what it has destroyed. An eloquent example of this
phenomenon is provided by Gottdiener’s analysis (Gottdiener, 1995)
of American shopping malls and their recreation of heritage scenes
which exude a certain sense of authenticity in order to boost sales and
contribute to the success of consumer society. In the same way that the
spaces of postmodernity are the product of a convergence of discourses
and a rechannelling of images – authenticity becoming a marketable
good or an incentive to buy – their representations in diasporic litera-
ture are also the product of several influences, which they represent
and denounce. There is a lot more to them than nostalgic recreations of
the past; they are at a crossroads of influences, ranging from the immi-
grant’s wish to appropriate or reclaim his country, to a description of
how the West is still preying on it, exploiting it even further.
The following discussion seeks to examine how the representation
of places in Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane – not only the homeland but
also the host country – is not just the expression of some misplaced
nostalgia and longing for the past, but is part and parcel of a strategy
of packaging and marketing, not only of the margins but also of the
centre, which is derived from the re-creation of space in postmodern-
ity. Rather than constituting distinct discourses, the avatars of colo-
nial discourse are recycled and rechannelled, as is the nostalgia of the
migrant, the two converging in a sort of postmodern reinvention of
space which Ali hints at through the image of the snowglobe, an image
which stresses the artificiality and mock authenticity of postmodern
simulacra of spatiality.
The image of the snowglobe is introduced into the novel through the
character of doctor Azad, who appreciates the soothing effect that these
objects have on him ‘It’s calming,’ he remarks, ‘everything settle[s]
back down’ after the storm (361). What seems to matter is not so much
the specificity of the landscapes featured, and which are not described,
as the paradigmatic meaning of a world immune to change, as well as
the idea of preserving a place the way it used to be. In this sense, the
snowglobe becomes endowed with several meanings throughout the
novel. The idea of preservation evokes the nostalgia of the immigrant,
an idea which is hammered home through various other objects like
the Bengali objects Chanu keeps in a showcase, as if to isolate them
from their London surroundings and preserve them from the passing
of time. It is also evoked through the references to the way Chanu
still thinks of his country, as a place which ‘ranks Number One in the
World happiest survey’ (290). This statement, which he found on the
internet, is debunked by Hasina’s letters in which she tells her sister
Nazneen of women beaten, raped, exploited and disfigured by their
husbands who throw acid at them. Fossilizing the country is there-
fore presented as a natural strategy of survival for the immigrant, even
though it may get in the way of a successful integration into the host
country. In the case of Chanu, the idealized Bangladesh he has kept

intact in the corner of his mind and to which he will eventually return,
comforts him in the illusion that his stay in the UK is only temporary
and that it is merely a form of inverted colonization (‘when the English
went to our country, they did not go to stay. They went to make money,
and the money they made, they took it out of the country. They never
left home. Mentally’ 174).
But the snowglobe also evokes another discourse, that of colonialism,
in which the native land is frozen in time, and described as belonging
to a distant past, before history even started. As such, the snowglobe is
also reminiscent of colonial discourse and its representation of foreign
territories as unspoilt and ready to be settled, as if they belonged to a
time before modernity and progress (Said, 1978). In Orientalism, Edward
Said reminds us that one of the main tropes of colonial discourse is the
use of the present tense to describe native people, which he interprets
as a way of representing them outside of history:
Rather than listing all the figures of speech associated with the
Orient – its strangeness, its difference, its exotic sensuousness, and
so forth – we can generalize about them as they were handed down
through the Renaissance. They are all declarative and self-evident;
the tense they employ is the timeless eternal; they convey an impres-
sion of repetition and strength; they are always symmetrical to, and
yet diametrically inferior to, a European equivalent, which is some-
times specified, sometimes not. For all these functions it is frequently
enough to use the simple copula is. (Said, 1995 [1978] 72)
But the snowglobe also links up with postmodernity in more ways

than one. First, its solidity and the permanence it evokes work as an
antidote to the chronic lack of bearings experienced by the diasporic
subject, and which can be seen as emblematic of the postmodern
condition. Azad is not the only character to suffer from the desta-
bilizing experience of being between places; at the end of the novel,
Nazneen herself looks at the plane tickets, perplexed at the realization
that these flimsy bits of paper represent a return to her former life in
Bangladesh. Indeed, these characters who experience a form of mobil-
ity pushed to its radical limit, who still lead two lives in two countries
and who are given the possibility not to sever the cord with the home-
land by communication technologies and improvements in means of
transport, experience the thrilling everywhereness of postmodernity,
the feeling of ubiquity given by the possibility of leading two lives
in one. And yet, because they straddle two cultures, they sometimes
find themselves ‘fall(ing) between two stools’ as Rushdie puts it in
Imaginary Homelands (15). As such they like the reassuring quality of
a world immune to change, which is what the snowglobe ultimately
represents. As Hewinson has argued, this preservation of the past is
crucial to preserve the self:
The impulse to preserve the past is part of the impulse to preserve

the self. Without knowing where we have been, it is difficult to know
where we are going. The past is the foundation of individual and col-
lective identity, objects from the past are the source of significance
as cultural symbols. Continuity between past and present creates a
sense of sequence out of aleatory chaos and, since change is inevit-
able, a stable system of ordered meaning enables us to cope with both
innovation and decay. The nostalgic impulse is an important agency
in adjustment to crisis, it is a social emollient and reinforces national
identity when confidence is weakened or threatened. (Hewinson,
1989 [1987] 86)
But the postmodern repackaging which produces a simulacrum of

place also works in a specific way and according to certain rules. To fol-
low up on the image of the snowglobe, this recreation of space operates
within a certain format. It picks and chooses, selects places according
to their potential in terms of appeal and sales, and redefines the real
geography, wiping whole areas off the map. If we take the example of a
snowglobe featuring London, the chances are that Brick Lane will not be
represented – although it might be in the years to come if the area cap-
italizes on the Indo-chic fashion. On the other hand, Big Ben, the Tower
of London, St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster and Buckingham Palace
will be present, together with a couple of double deckers and telephone
boxes. To a certain extent, this newly designed, repackaged London,
would be emblematic of the way postmodernity operates in relation to
geography, bringing places together, operating a certain compression of
space, and redefining the contours of the city independently of natural
geography, creating an ‘authentic’ image which is anything but authen-
tic. In the last part of this discussion I propose to focus on the way
Ali brings side by side the real England, which she tries to conjure up
through her depiction of Brick Lane, and the pseudo authentic England
marketed by the tourism industry. By ‘the real England’ I do not wish to
imply that Ali sets out to write a detailed, accurate and realistic account
of life in Brick Lane,4 but rather to expose the workings of the simulacra
of touristy London Nazneen herself falls prey to.
Brick Lane juxtaposes two ‘Englands’: that of Brick Lane and its immi-
grants who sometimes have never ventured beyond the confines of the
Asian district, and the ‘sights’, Buckingham Palace and Covent Garden,
where tourists go. Ali’s characters seldom get to see what they have never
ceased to consider to be the ‘real England’, England as it is marketed
and advertised – no longer by the propaganda of colonialism but by
the tourism industry. At the end of the novel, when Chanu starts plan-
ning the family’s return to Bangladesh, Nazneen stares nostalgically at
a mug whose picture features an English country house. Although she
has been in England for several years, she has never seen a house like
the one on her mug and still entertains the idea that the ‘real England’
is out there somewhere:
A cracked mug bearing a picture of a thatch-roofed cottage and a

mouse in trousers leaning on the gatepost. It was a picture of England.
Roses around the door. Nazneen had never seen this England but
now, idly, the idea formed that she would visit it. (367)
Another passage evokes the family’s trip to central London, which

Chanu, the father, discovers after thirty years in the UK. After all these
years, and although he knows that England is not only Buckingham
Palace but also Brick Lane, Chanu feels that he has to take his family to
see the sights, and the careful preparations he makes beforehand show
how important the outing is. Yet its meaning is ambiguous: it can be
read as a rite of passage which seems to mean ‘we have seen the real
England, the centre, and now we belong here’; but it can also mean
‘we have seen the England everyone wants to see and we can all go
home’, which is what Chanu eventually does. Ironically enough, the
journey to the centre pushes him further back to the periphery and
makes him feel more foreign, which undermines the interpretation of
the rite of passage. Clad in a brand new outfit he has bought especially
for the excursion, Chanu looks like a perfect tourist. He has loaded his
numerous pockets with ‘a compass, guidebooks, binoculars, bottled
water, maps, and two types of disposable camera’ (238), so much so that
people end up taking pictures of him and his family. The long-awaited
trip to the centre only reveals that there is no centre, no real England,
except on Nazneen’s cracked mug, an image which hammers home the
fake and brittle quality of the simulacrum. It is just as fake as the Hindu
paraphernalia used as an emblem to attract Westerners to the Days of

the Raj restaurant:
Days of the Raj restaurant had a new statue in the window: Ganesh
seated against a rising sun, his trunk curling playfully on his breast.
The Lancer already displayed Radha-Krishna; Popadum went with
Saraswati; and Sweet Lassi covered all the options with a black-
tongued, evil-eyed Kali and a torpid soapstone Buddha.
‘Hindus?’ said Nazneen when the trend first started. ‘Here?’
Chanu patted his stomach. ‘Not Hindus. Marketing. Biggest god of
all.’ The white people liked to see the gods. ‘For authenticity’, said
Chanu. (375)
In this extract, the marketing of the margins works in a slightly ironic

mode since the owners of Days of the Raj are willing to revive the
nostalgia of colonial India in order to make some profit with Western
consumers.
In this section we have seen how there is a lot more to the exotic or
nostalgic recollections of the Indian subcontinent than a mere narra-
tive of nostalgia. Ali’s novel suggests a much larger reflection on the
artificiality of places and their repackaging. In Brick Lane, these various
discourses – the nostalgia of the im/migrant, the avatars of colonial-
ism and the strategies of postmodernity seem to merge, maintaining
for a time some kind of illusion which is later dispelled. Interestingly
enough, it even seems that the nostalgia of the migrant, as evoked
through Azad, is complicit with the recreation of a would-be authenti-
city. Nazneen herself is ‘consumed’ by Karim because she represents ‘the
real’ Bengali woman and as such provides him with an affective locus
standi which allows him to forget for a time the fact that he has never
been to Bangladesh and is without a country he can call his own.
From the Promised Land to homecoming narratives:

interrogating Western myths and doxa
Diasporic novels dealing with immigration are not melodramatic chron-

icles of the immigrants’ thwarted hopes and great expectations. Rather,
they probe much further than the locus of individual trajectories and
serve as a springboard for more daring hypotheses as to the workings
of the world the characters set out to explore. A salient feature of these
novels is their emphasis on the disjunction between representations of
immigration internalized by im/migrants, which haunts them when

they set foot in the Promised Land, and the less glamorous and more
brutal actual experience of immigration. It is precisely because their
efforts do not always meet with success that diasporic people illustrate
the ruggedness of the global village. Characters like Chanu in Brick Lane
or Professor Vadhera in Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine – who tries
to keep up the pretence that he has an academic job when he doesn’t –
draw our attention to the point where myths metamorphose – or fail
to metamorphose – into reality. That is, the point where they either
materialize or recede into the realm of fiction. Needless to say, dis-
course, in the broad sense of the term, is not only part and parcel of this
process, but occupies a central position. As such, diasporic literature
invites us to interrogate discursive constructs and representations, dis-
course in general as well as myths. My interest in this section is both in
myths such as the Promised Land as well as what we could call the new
myths of supermodernity, the doxa5 of such popular images as Marshall
McLuhan’s idea that the world has become a global village. When, in
Ali’s novel, Chanu realizes that buying a computer will not be the end
of his problems and will not get him a job, he experiences the limita-
tions of contemporary myths which turn out to be lures and unful-
filled promises, like the ubiquity of new technologies. The image of the
computer, which was meant to give him access to the web and which
is now covered in cobwebs, goes against the optimistic view that new
technologies enable us to belong to virtual communities and escape the
determinism of the local. Chanu’s tragic story from moderate success
to a far from glorious return to his homeland points to a key feature of
the experience of im/migration: the clash between myth and reality,
between representations and the actual experience of im/migrants.
In Kunzru’s6 novel Transmission, the disjunction between discourse
and reality is of a different nature from that discussed in relation to
Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane. Arjun is not lured by the propaganda
of colonialism and the supremacy of the colonial centre, but is under
the spell of the idea of American economic supremacy which converges
with more traditional myths at the heart of American identity like the
Promised Land, the land of plenty, or even the frontier, as well as more
popular beliefs like the global village. One of the first instances of dis-
junction between myth and reality and of the subsequent undermin-
ing of discursive representations, appears very early in the novel when
Arjun visits the office of Databodies, an agency which has promised
him a job in the US. Arjun catches a glimpse of a row of clocks on the
wall, which indicate the time in several countries. The juxtaposition of
different times fails to give him an impression of ubiquity, the feeling of

being in all these places at the same time, of being able to go easily from
one to the other and use the time difference to get to a place before hav-
ing actually left the previous one. Arjun knows better: he knows that
the world has not shrunk. The optimistic juxtaposition of the different
clocks, which somehow recalls McLuhan’s idea of the global village is
soon replaced by a less glorious image, that of the globe contracting
like ‘a deflating beach globe.’ This image somehow de-mythifies the
illusionary metaperspective of contemporary man who thinks he can
be anywhere any time and suggests that it is not unlike the fantasy of a
child playing with a beach globe.
Behind the desk sat the receptionist. Above her a row of clocks, relics
of the optimistic 1960s, displayed the time in key world cities. New
Delhi seemed to be only two hours ahead of New York, and one
behind Tokyo. Automatically Arjun found himself calculating the
shrinkage in the world implied by this error, but, lacking even a best
estimate for certain of the variables, his thoughts trailed away. For a
moment or two the image hung around ominously in his brain, the
globe contracting like a deflating beach globe. (Kunzru, 2004, 6)
Arjun is soon to realize that the world has not become a global village;
distances may have been reduced, but this has not solved the problem
of mobility altogether.
There is a similar image in Kiran Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss
and it serves a similar purpose. The character of Sai, Jemumbhai’s grand-
daughter, has ordered an inflatable globe from the national geographic
society. Yet the letter never gets to her remote Nepali village and the
promise of the globe – and metaphorically of holding the globe in her
hands – is fulfilled much later, once she has forgotten about it.
When Arjun finally arrives in the US, the first contact with the
Promised Land is not really up to his expectations. After he has found
out that there is no job lined up for him, he is in for another shock
when he realizes that he has been exiled to a distant city suburb. As he
does not own a car in a country whose urban geography has been rede-
fined according to the principle of ‘deconcentration’ (Gottdiener, 1995)
he finds himself miles away from downtown, with a sense of alienation.
In other words, the fact that he does not own a car in a country where
mobility is both an organizing principle and a founding myth causes
Arjun to experience a second frontier beyond the official one, an invis-
ible line which separates immigrant workers who barely make a living
from the happy few, those who have ‘made it big’ and have found a
place in the centre, either in the city itself or in a more glamorous sub-
urban area.
This confrontation of postmodern myths, or more generally of the
doxa of postmodernity with the actual experience of immigrants, is a
common trope of homecoming narratives. These narratives often deal
with characters whose experience of immigration is not entirely success-
ful, not to say entirely disastrous, which leads the characters to make
the impossible decision to return home to their family and friends,
admitting to the fact that they have not succeeded. Kiran Desai’s The
Inheritance of Loss, is a good example of such texts. At the end of the
novel, Biju, the protagonist of the contemporary narrative of immigra-
tion7 finds himself destitute. He returns to India with less money than
he had, and has to face his father dressed in a frilly yellow dress he has
nicked from a clothes line after some thieves have deprived him of his
belongings. Kiran Desai thus literally rewrites the rags-to-riches nar-
rative into a riches-to-rags one, thereby exposing the hidden part of
the triumphalist rhetoric of earlier texts which, because they celebrate
the im/migrants’ capacity to adapt, often forget to question the actual
values of the West. Indeed, such novels do not limit themselves to inter-
rogate the feasibility of migration or the validity of postmodern myths.
They sometimes go so far as to interrogate the Western ethos, as we
shall see in the next chapter.
Interrogating postcolonial paradigms
In the previous section we have seen how diasporic narratives work

as indictments of postmodern myths and in particular myths linked
to mobility and territoriality. In this section I propose to discuss how
the geography they sketch of postmodernity also opens up to an inter-
rogation of postcolonial paradigms. Indeed, because they operate not
only in a passive mode, as testimonies and reflections of diasporic
life, but actively question certain tensions and expose certain clashes,
their writers add their own contribution to the body of texts seeking to
understand contemporary transformations of global geography.
One of the first paradigms which need to be interrogated is the centre
and periphery model, which has been a major landmark in studies of
international relations and global exchanges ever since the 1990s. The
paradigm was initially developed by Wallerstein and applied to post-
colonial theory by the authors of The Empire Writes Back, a study of the
global colonial situation. When the book came out in the late eighties,
it was hailed as a groundbreaking analysis of the mechanisms of polit-

ical, economic and cultural domination and as such it has constituted a
valuable tool of analysis for anyone working in the field of postcolonial
studies ever since. Some fifteen years later, the model probably needs to
be questioned and amended. Among the criticisms generally made to
this model is the idea that the opposition centre/periphery, colonizers/
colonized is no longer valid. Indeed, former centres have moved or have
been shifted and not only have former colonies overthrown the yoke
of colonization, they have sometimes become influential countries in
their own right (Appadurai8 1996, 32; Punter, 2000).
Among the new models which have emerged in recent years is that
developed by Arjun Appadurai in Modernity at Large. This ambitious
model not only seeks to account for the forming of transnational net-
works and zones of influence on a global scale, it also seeks to account
for the role and consequences of information technologies on local
and global communities, while leaving room for future reconfigur-
ations as new centres emerge and former ones become less influential.
Indeed, one of the parameters which Appadurai successfully takes on
board when elaborating his global framework is the transitoriness of
political centres and the fact that they are constantly challenged, as he
knows from first-hand experience, having grown up in India and wit-
nessed the influence of British culture being gradually replaced by that
of America, through the growing influence of popular culture, movies
and fashion.
I begged my brother at Stanford (in the early 1960s) to bring me

back blue jeans and smelled America in his Right Guard when he
returned. I gradually lost the England that I had earlier imbibed in
my Victorian schoolbooks [...]. Such are the little defeats that explain
how England lost the Empire in postcolonial Bombay. (Appadurai,
1996, 1–2)
The theory put forward by Appadurai in this book revolves around the
notion of ‘scape.’ His starting point is the observation that in the last
decades of the twentieth century, new technologies – in particular com-
munication technologies – have come to play a central role in the lives
of millions of people throughout the world and have evolved from their
initial instrumental function in the workplace to make their way into
millions of households, thereby blurring the frontier between the public
sphere and the private sphere, the workplace and the sphere of domes-
ticity. The fact that the internet – perhaps the paradigmatic example
of this phenomenon – has made an immense breakthrough in a very

short time poses the question of its long-term consequences and poten-
tial effects on existing communities. The starting point of Appadurai’s
analysis is the realization that communication technologies have facili-
tated the development of new types of communities which transcend
geographical borders. Among them are the scientific colleges, which
exchange information on an international scale or the ‘communities of
sentiment’, like that which formed after the Rushdie case when many
people throughout the globe felt the need to express their opinion and
defend freedom of expression. On an individual level, one of the main
consequences of the development not only of the internet but also of
other media like cable TV, which has broadened the choice of available
channels, is the multiplication of sets of references to which people are
exposed. Instead of sharing the encyclopaedia9 of their immediate con-
text, people have gained increased access to other contexts, including
‘virtual’ ones. And as Appadurai explains, it has therefore become pos-
sible for individuals to project themselves beyond regional or national
boundaries:
More people than ever before seem to imagine routinely the possibil-
ity that they or their children will live and work in places other than
where they were born: this is the wellspring of the increased rates
of migration at every level of social, national, and global life. [...]
Those who wish to move, those who have moved, those who wish
to return, and those who wish to stay rarely formulate their plans
outside the sphere of radio and television, cassettes and videos, news-
print and telephone. For migrants, both the politics of adaptation to
new environments and the stimulus to move or return are deeply
affected by a mass-mediated imaginary that frequently transcends
national space. (Appadurai, 1996, 6)
Central to Appadurai’s theory are therefore the idea of imagination and

‘imagined communities’ which he borrows from Benedict Anderson10
and transposes to the current context where new technologies and
new media have generated new types of networks defined by com-
mon interests and shared activities which may take place in separate
loci. Appadurai identifies several international communities which he
refers to as ‘technoscape’, ‘financescape’, ‘mediascape’ ‘ethnoscape’ and
‘ideoscape’. His theory posits the possibility of transcending regional
and national boundaries and gaining access to other contexts. To a
certain extent, it reflects the actual situation where the nation state is
increasingly challenged by the development of transnational activities

and the ‘scapes’ which he imagines bear witness to the new world geog-
raphy which bends the rigid boundaries between the nation states.
These terms with the common suffix – scape also indicate that
these are not objectively given relations that look the same from
every angle of vision but, rather that they are deeply perspectival
constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situ-
atedness of different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals,
diasporic communities, as well as subnational groupings and move-
ments [...]. These landscapes thus are the building blocks of what
(extending Benedict Anderson) I would like to call imagined worlds,
that is the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically sit-
uated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe.
(Appadurai, 1996, 33)
Much as I appreciate Appadurai’s efforts to theorize the changes of

the contemporary world, I would like to express certain doubts and
reservations concerning his theory of the scapes, but also interrogate
the political position which underpins his theory. My main concern is
that when circling new zones of commonality in different parts of the
globe, Appadurai sketches zones which group people together accord-
ing to their interests but level out and omit their status, both economic
and social. In other words, Appadurai seems to forget about hierarch-
ies, inequities and power struggles. What in my view is lacking in his
theory is a sense of participation and agency, a sense of direction (who
receives the input/where the input is given). Indeed, in his ambitious
attempt to map zones of influence and commonality on a global level,
Appadurai positions his scapes on a horizontal plane, which leaves no
room for the verticality of both local and global hierarchies to enter
the picture. The question of the redistribution of individuals on a glo-
bal level and the impact of power struggle on their repositioning in
the hierarchical system of the host country is altogether left out. In my
view, this feature is one of the main failings of transnational frame-
works as a whole, and not only of Appadurai’s, and can be explained
by the fact that such frameworks do not take account of the category
of nation and its subcategories, in particular that of class. In this sense,
Appadurai is probably more guilty of ‘meeting the agenda of neo-
liberalism,’ as it has often been said of Homi Bhabha, than Bhabha
himself, since his global map represents the third space as one large
middle-class of immigrants.
If we try to visualize his scapes and the way they spread through-
out the globe, we find ourselves faced with a map where everything
revolves around major cities and world capitals, to the detriment of less
influential areas. Each scape originates in one of the main cities of the
world, and reaches out to other regions, not on the basis of geograph-
ical continuity, but on the basis of economic opulence and influence.
The fact that the scapes seem to extend far into remote areas of the
globe, like the mediascape, and reflect the culture and representations
of the wealthy and influential participants, is bound to generate iron-
ical juxtapositions. Let us imagine a group of girls in Tamil Nadu watch-
ing an American soap opera and trying to understand the predicament
of Western girls with eating disorders. The gap which separates the two
worlds not only challenges the view that the world has become one glo-
bal village where people all share in the same cultural representations
thanks to the mediascape, but clearly points to the limitations of com-
munication technologies and the supposed transparency of images.
Another aspect which is left out of Appadurai’s global map is the dif-
ferential mobility which results from one’s access or lack of access to
modern technologies or means of transport, an idea which is present
in several contemporary novels, like Kunzru’s Transmission or Desai’s
Inheritance of Loss. In Transmission, the idea of differential mobility is
evidenced in the tension between ‘the sublime mobility of those who
travel without ever touching the ground’ and ‘the forced motion of the
shopping-cart pushers, the collectors of cardboard boxes.’ (45).11 Such
differential mobility not only generates a divide between those who
follow the land and those who literally hop from one city to another, it
also leads to an erosion and virtual disappearance of in-between spaces
which are no longer on the global map of international exchanges.
This idea is also present in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, where
it is expressed through a topography in two layers which reflects the
asymmetry of power relations.12
The question which is raised, ultimately, is that of the impact of these
virtual communities on real ones. The example of Chanu in Brick Lane,
who hopes to bypass the rules of the local by surfing the internet, shows
not only the illusory quality of the virtual world but also points to the
potentially harmful consequences of these technologies and of the vir-
tual communities they help generate. Not only do they fail to be fully
empowering, they may also encourage individuals to be less involved
in the local fabric. Monica Ali’s novel seems to suggest that new tech-
nologies give us access to other contexts but do not change our daily
lives and that as such, virtual communities are not valid substitutes
for real ones. At best, they may generate a fleeting and transitory sense
of kinship but in the long run they do not have what it takes to be
real communities. As Bauman observes, the main difference between
real communities and the would-be communities of the liquid modern
world comes from the reciprocity or lack of reciprocity between mem-
bers of a community, and the idea of commitment. While real commu-
nities are based on the principle of reciprocity between individuals, the
virtual communities which characterize postmodernity result from a
fleeting convergence of desires and a confluence of interests. This con-
vergence is limited to a certain temporality and is based on the fact that
one can discontinue at any time. What makes them appealing is pre-
cisely the fact that they seem to have the advantages of existing com-
munities without their shortcomings; one can feel part of them without
feeling tied down:
Synchronization of focuses of attention and topics of conversation

is not, of course, tantamount to a shared identity, but the focuses
and the topics drift on so rapidly that there is hardly time to grasp
that truth. They tend to disappear from view and be forgotten before
their bluff has had time to be called. (Bauman, 2004, 97)
Language and new territorialities
In this fourth and final section I wish to discuss the role of language
in the reconfiguration of space. The following discussion draws on the
work of anthropologist Marc Augé and on his reflections on the role
of language in the creation of the non-places of supermodernity. In
his book, Augé distinguishes between traditional places, which were
defined according to a pattern of continuity between land, commu-
nities and individuals (land = society = nation = culture = religion)
and what he calls the new places of supermodernity. These places are
not real places where people come into contact naturally, but places in
between, transitional places like airports or train stations where people
come into contact, or seem to do so only superficially.
the word ‘non-place’ designates two complementary but distinct

realities: spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit,
commerce, leisure), and the relations that individuals have with these
spaces. Although the two sets of relations overlap to a large extent,
and in any case officially (individuals travel, make purchases, relax),
they are still not confused with one another; for non-places mediate
a whole mass of relations, with the self and with others, which are
only indirectly connected with their purposes. As anthropological
places create the organically social, so non-places create solitary
contractuality. Try to imagine a Durkheimian analysis of a transit
lounge at Roissy! (Augé, 1995, 94)
According to Augé, language is a constitutive feature of non-places (‘The

link between individuals and their surroundings in the space of non-
place is established through the mediation of words.’(94)). Augé gives
the example of French highways, which reconfigure space, either by
bringing cities closer together or by adding distances between towns
situated off the highway line. He also points out how language is omni-
present, whether it be on road signs, which indicate sights you drive
by but cannot see, or in the instructions which tell you to drive safely,
check your tyres or stop for a bit of a rest. Augé points to the paradox of
a place which seems to have been deserted by human beings, and where
those who have remained are sometimes less talkative than the metal-
lic voice of automated machines, a world saturated with language, but
a language which operates within the limits of a highly codified type
of communication which only works one way. In such places, the role
of language no longer seems to be that of a vector of communication;
language it seems has been reassigned a new task which consists in cre-
ating simulacra of reality.
This analysis of how language can redefine space and places13 seems
to me to provide an interesting entry point to understand the redefin-
ition of common space in Hari Kunzru’s novel Transmission. The world
depicted by Kunzru is not unlike the postmodern cities described by
Gottdiener in Postmodern Semiotics, in which he analyses the gradual
disappearance of common space in suburban areas and the creation of
substitute places of sociability like shopping malls which take up the
function traditionally played by markets or city centres.
The community Kunzru describes of Virugenix employees is char-
acterized by a fragmentation of space whereby places become islands
and the community a sort of archipelago formed of separate entities
which come into contact at regular intervals, thereby generating an ero-
sion of the social fabric. Arjun’s experience, at the heart of the Silicon
Valley is that of an environment where people no longer interact on a
personal basis and where it soon becomes obvious that if frontiers have
been brought down by new technologies, they have been replaced by
new strategies of division and fragmentation, by partitions and cubicles
but also by new habits introduced into the workplace, for example a
systematic use of e-mails to get in touch with people who work in the
adjoining cubicle. Every attempt made by Arjun to get in touch with
someone directly is taken as an intrusion into their private sphere.
Isolation and an overall absence of contact have become the norm:
Everyone left their phones on voice mail and most wore headsets
while they worked, creating a private space that was, according to
custom, violated only in an emergency. Interaction was via e-mail,
even if the participants occupied neighboring cubicles. This made
sense to Arjun. Personal space is valuable. [...] Interrupting someone
to talk to them is a way of pushing your query to the top of their
stack. It overrides someone’s access controls and objectively lessens
their functionality, which was as close to an engineering definition
of rudeness as he felt he was ever likely to come. (54)
The aim of the questionnaire, which each and every employee of

Virugenix is supposed to fill out, is not so much to evaluate people as
to create an artificial sense of togetherness and introduce a new form
of virtual bonding. By giving this population of workaholics the illu-
sion that they share similarities with other employees in spite of their
isolation, the questionnaire constitutes an artificial bond whose aim
is to unify – at least superficially – a group of individuals who have
never been involved in any form of social life outside work and create
‘an imagined community’ of Virugenix employees. I am deliberately
extending the meaning of the term ‘imagined community’ (used by
Benedict Anderson to refer to the imagined community of the nation)
to refer to the changes inherent in the current context and the forma-
tion of new communities.
Week by week, Arjun learned more about himself. His Dungeons &
Dragons alignment turned out to be Lawful Good. His penis was of
average size. He was not a secret Mac user, though his lack of famil-
iarity with sex toys and his inability to recall an occasion where he
dressed up in leather or rubber clothing to please his man rated him
‘an old-fashioned gal.’ His twelve lattes and nine Cokes a day habit
also bracketed him a ‘high-level caffeine addict.’ Worried, he sent
an e-mail to a support group, who mailed back suggesting he drink
fewer caffeine-containing beverages. (55)
In this virtual world where everything is mediated by technologies,

direct interaction between individuals seems to have disappeared.
Bonds and relationships do not depend on spatial proximity, nor are

they left to chance; there seems to be no determinism of the local since
the local fabric itself has vanished. Even when spatial proximity could
facilitate direct communication, it is still mediated by the questionnaire
whose function is to create an artificial sense of sameness in lieu of
real communication between individuals. The communication pattern
described by Kunzru is not only artificial and indirect, generated, ori-
ented and monitored from the outside as it is, it is also reminiscent
of dystopian novels like 1984, in which the telescreens not only show
Big Brother, they also allow him to spy on people. The irony of the
title of the novel soon becomes clear. The idea of ‘transmission’ has
been reduced to a sheer minimum, to the transmission of data. In other
words, the act of transmitting has been cut down to what is strictly
necessary for information to circulate.
Another aspect of the use of language in the sketching of new territo-
rialities lies in the process of semantic re-encoding of words according
to dominant discourse. In the following discussion I propose to turn to
the work of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Central to Bauman’s work is
the notion of liquidity. This metaphor, which negotiates two registers, the
figurative and the abstract is, he argues, a key element in the capitalist’s
strategy of undermining the existing world order. Indeed, the term liquid-
ity conjures up several positive notions, including freedom of movement
versus rigidity, change versus stasis, and so on. Yet when Bauman uses the
term fluidity he means the strategy of destabilization which has gener-
ated the loss of bearings that affects postmodernity in a world where all
solid structures (among which the state) have been challenged and whose
actual existence is under threat. Bauman’s concept of liquidity draws our
attention to the potential effects of a trickster discourse which plays on
language the better to achieve its aim.
The concept of fluidity, which Bauman borrows from Lyotard,14
underpins his work and is analysed in great detail in his major books
Liquid Modernity, The Human Cost of Globalization, Life in Pieces, Identity,
and so on. It is not just an elegant metaphor, but also a concept pregnant
with meaning which allows him to pinpoint the specificities of contem-
porary life. We could imagine that under the pen of Bauman, fluid-
ity would have had rather positive connotations. Indeed, throughout
his life, Bauman has experienced the predicament of minority groups
threatened by totalitarian regimes. Born into a Jewish family in Poland,
he experienced anti-Semitism at a very young age, and the situation
only got worse with time when, as an adult he lost his job and decided
to flee Poland and live in Israel. Now resident in England, where he has
lived for the past twenty-three years, Bauman has experienced political
fluidity, the freedom to move to a country whose political orientations
one feels comfortable with. Yet the fluidity he refers to in his works is
not political fluidity but that promoted by capitalism: that of free trade
and anti-protectionist rules. For Bauman, this fluidity is manifold and
generates a series of consequences for society but also for the individual:
loss of bearings, disintegration of the family unit, of social ties and local
networks, to list just a few.
Bauman’s starting point is his observation of the changes in people’s
living conditions which took place in the twentieth century and in par-
ticular the way globalization has had a negative effect on many aspects
of people’s lives. Bauman is interested in the way precarious conditions
have affected and continue to affect the family unit and the social
structure of given societies.15 In The Human Cost of Globalization, he
argues that human beings have become commodified and that capit-
alism has led them to see their lives as a series of episodes rather than
a progression towards a goal; they have become used to the idea that
things are constantly changing, that nothing is solid anymore and that
they should cease to yearn for stability in a world where the motto is no
longer to settle down but ‘always to adapt’. All the things that used to
act as bearings for the individual (his job, his family unit and his role in
society, etc.) have become fleeting and unreliable, hence the metaphor
of fluidity. As Bauman explains, a fluid needs to be contained; it is not
enough to give it a shape, it needs to be held in place, which requires
continuous effort.
This analysis leads Bauman to conclude that in a context of constant
mutability of forms, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of
changes and understand the forces at stake. In the long run, continues
Bauman, solidity is bound to become an obsolete word, a signifier with-
out a signified and when it no longer refers to something, people will
naturally forget what it meant. This scenario is not unlike the ‘natural’
disappearance of words in Orwell’s dystopia 1984, in which words no
longer referring to concepts or notions in existence fall into oblivion
and then totally disappear. Bauman himself refers to Orwell’s famous
dystopia when he explains that what is truly striking is that this state
of utter precariousness has not been imposed by a totalitarian regime
but has been chosen freely in the name of freedom (freedom to travel,
freedom of trade, etc.).
Contrary to most dystopian scenarios, this effect has not yet been
achieved through dictatorial rule, subordination, oppression, or
enslavement; nor through the ‘colonization’ of the private sphere by

the ‘system’. Quite the opposite: the present-day situation emerged
out of the radical melting of the fetters and manacles rightly or
wrongly suspected of limiting the individual freedom to choose and
to act. Rigidity of order is the artefact and sediment of the human
agents’ freedom. That rigidity is the overall product of ‘releasing the
brakes’: of deregulation, liberalization, ‘flexibilization’, increased flu-
idity, unbridling the financial, real estate and labour markets, easing
the tax burden, etc. (5)
To return to the main thread of my argumentation, language plays an

important part in the spread and influence of global capitalism as it is
described in contemporary diasporic texts like those by Kunzru or Kiran
Desai, by using the imaginary and playing with people’s unconscious.
For example, the term fluidity aptly sums up the game of double coding
and the way language is used as an instrument of persuasion. This idea
of double coding draws on the analysis of the workings of capitalism
in Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze and
Guattari show that one of the strengths of capitalism is its capacity to
rechannel deterritorialized fluxes and make them converge. Capitalism,
they argue, has the capacity to incorporate everything, which includes
redirecting its own failings and glitches in such a way that they con-
tribute to the strength of the system. I would argue that this notion of
re-encoding provides a useful entry point to understanding the way
discourse operates as a veil of opacity suggesting as it does appealing
notions such as mobility, fluidity and liquidity whilst concealing the
bleaker reality of economic stasis or decline.
When people are seduced by the fluidity of modernity, what entices
them is the idea of change as opposed to stasis, not the loss of bear-
ings which can result from it. But the role of discourse in this pro-
cess is all the more worrying in a world in which it reigns supreme
(Eagleton,16 2004 [2003]). It is my belief that the discourse about geo-
graphical mobility often conceals the decline of economic mobility in
many industrialized countries. When trying to analyse the workings
of the discourse on mobility and its consequences, it is necessary to
distinguish between different types of mobility and trace their inter-
actions. Some thirty years ago, mobility was often used in the sense of
economic mobility – in other words the fact of climbing the social lad-
der. Nowadays, when many industrialized countries experience struc-
tural difficulties linked to globalization, among which the increased
competition created by cheap labour and the subsequent delocalization
of firms to other countries, mobility has progressively lost some of its

meaning and thereby has been divested of its positive connotations.
It is increasingly used to refer to the short-term mobility of the tour-
ism industry or the forced geographic mobility of workers who would
otherwise be deprived of social mobility. This strategy, which operates
through language and is opaque to the migrant, is precisely what the
novels I have based my analysis on invite us to interrogate.
5
Disjunction, Ethics and
the Diasporic Subject
Amongst the issues which have emerged from recent studies on trans-
nationalism, globalism and the new world order is the idea that global-
ization has potentially made us all denizens if not citizens of the world
in a way eighteenth-century theorists of cosmopolitanism could never
have anticipated (Appiah, 2006). Not only are our mental horizons con-
siderably broader (Appadurai, 1996), our deeds and decisions have an
impact which reaches far beyond our national frontiers, as the current
debates about global warming and starvation seem to indicate. And yet
the passage from ‘the local tribe’ to what Anthony Appiah (2007) calls
‘the global tribe’ is far from being an altogether smooth one. If we have
undeniably gone more global – at least the privileged fringes of our
societies have – and can now project ourselves beyond the closed cir-
cle of family and locally contracted ties, the phenomenon has shown
its limits. The rise of nationalist voices and the revival of regional cus-
toms and ways of life are symptomatic of the limits and difficulties of
such dramatic tension between the local and the global which char-
acterizes life today (Bayart, 1996) in a world where local solidarities
often outshine global ties and where the global community sometimes
seems more like fiction than reality, a matrix of potential encounters,
a network of randomly constructed links, episodic and fleeting, non-
committal and changing, than real relations that bind members of a
community together.1 Theorists of postmodernity and Bauman in par-
ticular have evidenced the changes brought in a liquid modern world
where relationships are affected by the dissolving framework of sites of
encounter, leading to a casualization of ties and solidarities. The form-
ing of new vectors of sociability and in particular of networks – a term
no longer connoted negatively as tantamount to the modus operandi of
secret organizations but restored to a more positive sense – has not only
99
generated the formation of parallel sites of interaction, and of virtual

loci of sociability, it has also profoundly modified the way we conceive
of relationships, no longer as real, solid and involving commitment
but as temporary encounters and short-term associations which can
be discontinued at any time. For Bauman, these relations can only be
fragmentary and episodic – fragmentary because only one side of our
multi-sided selves is involved and episodic because the threads of indi-
vidual lives may be woven but these new patterns do not necessarily last
very long (Bauman, 1995, 46–8).
In this context, the very notion of community has become problem-
atic. Without totally subscribing to Eric Hobsbawm’s pessimistic view
that ‘never was the word “community” used more indiscriminately
and emptily than in the decades when communities in the sociological
sense of the term became hard to find in real life’ (Hobsbawm, 1994,
40) we have to admit that the community as a solid overarching frame-
work which precedes individuals and offers them a sense of stability
and certainty is on shaky ground. For Hobsbawm, the current emphasis
on identity and on identity politics is linked precisely to the fact that
communities as they used to be no longer exist and the revived interest
in society as a common denominator is symptomatic of the dissolution
of the social fabric and of the loosening of tightly-knit threads. ‘Men
and women’, he writes, ‘look for groups to which they can belong cer-
tainly and forever, in a world in which all else is moving and shifting,
in which nothing else is certain’ (Hobsbawm, 1996, 51).
The redefinition of the power struggle between intraterritorial
instances and extraterritorial powers has also had serious consequences
for the way we conceive of rights but also of obligations and duties,
in particular in the larger context of the extended community of the
nation. When the state fails to guarantee basic rights, how are we to
uphold the ideal of rule of law? In other words, how can the rule of law
survive the rat race of rampant capitalism? To be more rigorous with
regard to the way this question poses itself in the current context, a few
distinctions need to be made. This issue is not only situational, and the
very concept of the Rights of Man as an abstraction has always been
problematic. Though we all as citizens of a country conceive of our
rights without difficulty, the concept of Rights of Man in a more general
sense is more hazy and difficult to grasp; it is an abstraction removed
from the concrete reality of our lives in a given society. To some extent,
Hannah Arendt had anticipated the difficulty of this paradigmatic shift
when recalling Edmund Burke’s prophetic statement that ‘being noth-
ing but human’ was humanity’s greatest danger (Burke, 1790; quoted by
Disjunction, Ethics and the Diasporic Subject 101
Arendt, 1967 [1951] 299). Following up on the more sceptical and real-
istic path opened by Burke and Hobbes, Arendt denounced the unen-
forceable quality of human rights and their provisionality: the rights
of man, she argues ‘supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable
[...] whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sov-
ereign states’ (Arendt, 1967 [1951] 293).
This chapter is concerned with issues of ethics in the meta-society
of today’s transnational world. Indeed, one of the key questions raised
by such a radical redefinition of man’s relation to others within and
outside a given community is the question of the ethos of the global
community. What is the ethos of a world where locally contracted ties
seem to be dissolving, whereby affecting our bearings, the way we stand
but also our sense of duty to others? All these issues crystallize around
a central one: the question of whether twenty-first century man will
remain local or turn global, whether he will manage to translate his eth-
ical self into the broader context and reinvent an ethics for the global
world or simply become a-moral, unethical and detached. In the case
of diasporic people, the question cuts two ways. One of the key issues
of course is how their rights can be guaranteed outside the national
frontiers of their homelands. Another aspect involves their redefinition
as political and ethical subjects in the host country away from the com-
munity they were born into, when confronted with other values and
political systems. How can they take an active part in the shaping of
a social network, find their place in a new polis so that they do not
become global citizens, unattached, deterritorialized and uprooted, but
also without any political role or impact? In my introduction to this
book I briefly referred to the genre of the global novel whose perman-
ently uprooted characters seem to buttress the idea that we are all going
to become citizens of a liquid world and roam the world, free of all
ties and responsibilities. However in recent years, an increasingly large
number of authors have started to raise the issue of the im/migrant’s
political role and of his ethical involvement towards both the home
and the host country. Novels by Ali, Gurnah, Rushdie and Smith are not
only about the self-centred reinvention of an identity abroad or the per-
sonal fulfilment linked to immigration; they also address, sometimes
quite explicitly, the question of what migrants can do for the home and
host country; they intuit the potential danger inherent in the thrilling
rebirth of a new self, without a past but also without a family or com-
munity they are accountable to and who can afford to freely enjoy the
newly gained freedom of a slightly surreal life in a different country and
in a different language in which things never sound exactly the same.
This chapter takes up what has emerged as a recurring theme in this

book, namely the disjunctive phenomena inherent in the diasporic
experience, whether it be the forced amnesia entailed by the diasporic
experience, the schizophrenic ego which results from a split self which
lives no longer in the past and is still not rooted in the community of
the present, or the disjunction introduced by the coexistence of two
languages and sometimes of a mother tongue which has become out of
place and removed from its linguistic community. I propose to approach
these issues not only from the angle of transnationalism and globalism
but also with reference to cosmopolitanism. Indeed, cosmopolitanism
raises the issue of the transition from a locally defined ethos to that
of the meta-community. The implications of the term itself are worth
putting in perspective since long before it was used by eighteenth-
century thinkers like Kant, ‘cosmopolitanism’ was coined by the cynics
of fourth century BC for whom a citizen belonged first and foremost to
a community. In other words, civilization implied belonging to a com-
munity among communities, and it would be interesting to know what
they would have thought of today’s global citizens, uprooted diaspori-
ans and of the deterritorialized communities which sometimes straddle
divides but often ‘fall between two stools’ (Rushdie, 1991).
This line of inquiry therefore needs to extend beyond the issue of
ethics versus morality and the question of the erosion of morality,
although it is a timely issue (Eagleton, 2003; Badiou, 2003) to embrace
the question of rights in a transnational context; how rights are guar-
anteed, how they are translated into another country even though they
are tied to citizenship, but also how the rights of displaced populations
and diasporic communities are redefined and reterritorialized by the
rules of global capitalism. This discussion ultimately opens onto the
irreducibility of ethoses in a transnational world and its articulation
with a global political project (Hardt and Negri) which not only needs a
common goal but also a common language (Laclau).
Conflicting ethoses: of discontinuities in the

diasporic experience
In his book Cosmopolitanism, Ethics in a World of Strangers, Anthony

Appiah writes that ‘people who complain about the homogeneity pro-
duced by globalization often fail to notice that globalization is equally
a threat to homogeneity’ (Appiah, 2007 [2006] 101). And indeed, the
homogeneity normally associated with the global village is challenged
on different levels; one of them is the persistence of the values and
principles societies have set for themselves and which have acted as
a cornerstone from time immemorial. Naturally enough these values
resist the homogenizing varnish of globalism to reveal deeply ingrained
specificities. They resurface in situations of temporary but also long-
term if not permanent displacement and sometimes clash violently
with those of the immigrant’s host country.
This clash of conflicting world-views which come into contact in the
diasporic experience is an important motif of the emerging trend of
homecoming narratives to which I have referred in previous chapters.
These novels go one step further than earlier immigration novels in
their representation of the flaws of the West, insisting on the discrep-
ancy between its discourse and the reality of everyday life. Not only do
they confront myths of rebirth and regeneration in the new land to the
bleak reality of immigration, they also offer a critical and sometimes
scathing reassessment of its core values which they oppose to that of
the homeland. In so doing, they often point to the dramatic erosion of
values, in particular of family values which they contrast with the per-
sistence of traditional bonds and solidarities between members of an
extended family in their home country.
Abdulrazak Gurnah’s2 novel Admiring Silence, for example, addresses
the issue of the responsibilities of diasporic subjects towards their fel-
low countrymen.3 When leaving home and family behind, keeping his
new life and ties in England a secret from his family back home, the
protagonist decides to relinquish the duties he had towards his relatives
in the home country and embrace the self-oriented ethos of the West.
Yet, this novel which recounts the story of a reasonably well-integrated
immigrant, concludes with a rather unexpected twist, the protagonist
returning to the home country not so much out of some sense of nos-
talgia as from a sense of ethical commitment and belief in long-lasting
ties. His break-up with his partner, who is also the mother of their child
makes him realize the extent to which his life in the UK was superficial,
precisely because he did not have any strong commitment outside this
limited family circle, nor any real place in society despite the number
of years he had spent there.
Caryl Phillips’ novel A Distant Shore expresses a similar concern for
ethical issues which manifests itself in a duty to remember the forgot-
ten victims of illegal immigration. The novel, which opens on a graphic
description of the protagonist’s cellmate’s painful death in an atmos-
phere of total indifference throws into relief the plight of asylum seek-
ers who are deprived of the most basic of human rights and left to rot
away on the prison floor. But Phillips also dramatizes the ethical breach
which inhabits the diasporic subject as the protagonist wilfully tries to

forget his life back home to settle into a more comfortable routine. The
radical divide in the character’s life – yesterday an asylum seeker with-
out rights and today a respectable citizen living under a new name and
a new identity – is evidenced in the episode of the mirror scene, which
symbolizes a sort of mirror stage experience in adulthood when the
character learns to appropriate an identity and make it his own.
I washed out my mouth and then I looked at myself in the mirror. A

tired man’s face stared back at me. This was not the face of a thirty-
year-old man. England had changed me, but was this not the very
reason that I had come to England? I desired change. (275)
This radical divide, which runs throughout the narrative – a narrative

which juxtaposes or rather places side by side episodes of Solomon’s
past life and fragments of his life in the UK – constantly underlines the
tragic ironies of the protagonist’s story; he is killed by a gang of racist
young men years after he narrowly missed a near-death experience in
his home country. But more importantly, the novel lays emphasis on
the need to remember and to make sense of this fragmentation, which
not only threatens the sense of selfhood and identity, but the coherence
of the subject as an ethical subject. Hence the role of Dorothy, another
outcast living on the margins of society. A retired music teacher who
is sinking into depression and madness, Dorothy plays a crucial part in
the novel, not only because she echoes in the minor mode Solomon’s
life as an outcast, but also because she bears witness to a past no one
knows about and without which the protagonist has ‘only this one year
to his [my] life’ and is ‘burdened with hidden history’ (300). Far from
being the passive recipient of an eventful narrative or a sympathetic lis-
tener, Dorothy is entrusted with a function: that of registering the life
of this man prior to his change of identity.
Her function is spelled out very clearly at the end of the novel in
Solomon’s eloquent description of the migrant as ‘a coward trained to
forget’:
Each time I opened my eyes I heard Mum crying. I was a coward who
had trained himself to forget. I accepted from people. From Mr and
Mrs Anderson. I was no longer ‘Hawk’. I was no longer my mother’s
Gabriel. It was Solomon who learned of Mike’s death. It was Solomon
who was lying in a warm bed in a strange room among these kind
people. It was Solomon. I was Solomon. (297)
Caryl Phillips’ novel offers a good example of diasporic texts which

approach the ethical question in two distinct ways, by stressing the
clash of ethoses which occupies centre stage in the diasporic experi-
ence, but also by intuiting the potentially serious consequences of this
experience which is linked to the discontinuity it introduces into the
ethical subject, as if the almost schizophrenic nature of his life posed a
threat to his ethical integrity.
I propose to pursue this line of inquiry with a discussion of Salman
Rushdie’s novel Fury, which brings to the forefront the role played by
the discontinuity introduced into the alignment subject/language/soci-
ety. Indeed, one of the key features of the nation state, one which is
disrupted in a context of migration and influx of diasporic populations,
as we saw in Chapter 3, is the continuity between individuals and the
community, a continuity achieved through language and common val-
ues. In a diasporic context, these elements are realigned and compli-
cated by the coexistence of two languages but also by that of two sets
of values deeply linked to the languages of the communities they ori-
ginate in. Of course, in the case of immigrants whose life in the home
country was spent between two languages, as is often the case in India
for example, where it is not rare to see people switching from one lan-
guage to another or from a dialect to a language, the situation is slightly
different (Skinner, 1998).4 Yet it does not invalidate our hypothesis
since the two or three languages spoken in the home country all tie the
immigrant to the same community of speakers and to the same ethos.
From which it results that the real breach in the continuity between
value systems is that which exists between home and host cultures.
The split self of the immigrant and the diffraction of

the ethical subject: Fury by Salman Rushdie
In this post-fatwa novel, Rushdie takes a radically distinct stance from
earlier novels in which he liked to experiment with a postmodern use of
language, its ambiguities and arbitrariness, to pose key questions linked
to the consequences of the disruption of the pattern of linearity between
the subject and the larger community of the nation. Among them: what
happens to the use one makes of one’s mother tongue outside the com-
munity and the values it was initially rooted in? Do one’s intrinsic
values translate into another language one masters without necessarily
having the same proximity as with one’s mother tongue? What hap-
pens when one’s mother tongue is spoken outside its linguistic commu-
nity and in front of others who cannot understand it, when everything
and anything can be said, when words cease to be understood and to
have consequences? Can language become a responsibility-free zone,

where one can say anything independently of consequences?
The first pages of the novel set the tone, as Rushdie offers a vivid
and original depiction of New York as a boisterous city, a multi-ethnic,
multicultural and multilingual place. From the Polish cleaner to the
Pakistani taxi driver, the German Jewish plumber and the Punjabi con-
struction worker, Rushdie gives an auditory as much as a visual render-
ing of New York. This auditory melting pot forms a jarring polyphony of
voices which resonate from every street corner. The protagonist, Malik
Solanka is a Brit of Indian origin, who has left his family behind and
has fled to the US. As a foreigner himself, Solanka is interested in people
who are not typically American. When wandering down the streets,
he picks up fragments of conversations, sometimes telephone conversa-
tions between someone he can actually see and an absent and mysteri-
ous addressee whose cues can be reconstructed from the answers uttered
by the first speaker. The result is a flourish of voices disconnected from
a broader context – from given speakers and their utterances. The novel
thus raises the question of language in the broader context of commu-
nication and society. On an optimistic reading, the novel can be seen as
a celebration of a linguistic and cultural melting pot. Another, slightly
more sceptical reading might consist in interpreting it as an invitation
to reflect on the fragmentation of the self and the lack of continuity
between oneself and the verbal enactment of one’s personality through
language.
What I am interested in here is not the disjunction between language
and praxis as a result of social conventions, but the disjunction between
what one actually says in an adopted language and what one thinks,
and would actually say in his mother tongue.
This idea is suggested in the episode of the taxi driver which offers
what is probably the most blatant instance of language running amok.
Stuck in peak hour traffic, the cab driver bursts into anger and starts
cursing in his mother tongue:
‘Islam will cleanse this street of godless motherfucker bad drivers,’

the taxi driver screamed at a rival motorist. ‘Islam will purify this
whole city of Jew pimp assholes like you and your whore roadhog of
a Jew wife too’. All the way up Tenth Avenue the curses continued.
‘Infidel fucker of your underage sister, the inferno of Allah awaits
you and your unholy wreck of a motorcar as well.’ ‘Unclean off-
spring of a shit-eating pig, try that again and the victorious jihad will
crush your balls in its unforgiving fist.’ Malik Solanka, listening in
to the explosive, village-accented Urdu, was briefly distracted from

his inner turmoil by the driver’s venom. ALI MANJU said the card.
Manju meant beloved. [...] In between curses, he spoke to his mother’s
brother on the radio –‘yes Uncle. Yes, courteously, always, Uncle,
trust me. Yes, best policy’ [...] – and also asked Solanka sheepishly for
directions. (65–6)
After this outburst, Malik Solanka lets Ali know that Urdu is his mother
tongue and that he has understood everything the cab driver has said.
First, the driver refuses to admit that his words were actually insults,
before acknowledging that they indeed were. He ends up excusing him-
self before finally agreeing that he did not really mean what he said:
‘Sahib, if you heard it, then it must be so. But sir, you see, I am not
aware.’ Solanka lost patience, turned to go. ‘It doesn’t matter’, he
said. [...] As he walked off along Broadway, Beloved Ali shouted after
him, needily, asking him to be understood. [...] ‘it means nothing,
sahib. Me, I don’t even go to the mosque. God bless America, okay?
It’s just words.’ Yes, and words are not deeds, Solanka allowed, mov-
ing off fretfully. Though words can become deeds. If said in the right
place and at the right time, they can move mountains and change
the world. Also, uh-huh, not knowing what you’re doing – separating
deeds from the words that define them – was apparently becoming
an acceptable excuse. To say ‘I didn’t mean it’ was to erase meaning
from your misdeeds, at least in the opinion of the Beloved Alis of the
world. (66–7)
One of the most noticeable aspects of this passage, apart from the lin-
guistic creativity of Ali Manju, is the implication of speech and the
disjunctive process obviously at work in this warped discursive situ-
ation. When he thinks that Solanka cannot understand him, Ali utters
an impressive list of insults in Urdu. But when he realizes that Solanka
has actually grasped the meaning of what he said, Manju apologizes
and almost begs Solanka not to retain such a bad impression of him.
It is as if there were two Alis, the aggressive one who advocates racism
and fundamentalism, and the nice village boy who can be obedient
and respectful when speaking to members of his community on the
radio. In a way it is also as if there were two Urdus, the Urdu spoken
with friends and family and which is still meaningful, and loaded with
affective connotations, and the Urdu spoken in front of foreigners,
which provides Ali with a sphere of linguistic freedom and uncensored
private expression. This example shows how in this specific context the
mother tongue can become a responsibility-free zone where the immi-
grant can express himself but where he can also say literally anything
without being accountable for it (1). Not only is this situation com-
pletely artificial, it is one seldom encountered in real life where words
are necessarily part of a communication scheme. They are uttered and
received as such, and met with certain reactions at the receiving end.5
What happens when Solanka speaks to Ali in Urdu is that he revital-
izes the mother tongue, reinscribing it into a context where it actually
makes sense and triggers reactions. In other words, Solanka restores a
real situation of communication rather than an artificial one like that
in which the immigrant may find himself when he speaks in front of
people who cannot understand his language. (2)
(1)
S (L1) – Message (L1) – Receiver (L2)
(2)
S (L1) – Message (L1) – Receiver (L1)
Solanka’s comment (‘words can become deeds’), whose solemn under-

tones are powerful reminders of the Rushdie case, pinpoints the disjunc-
tion between words and meaning. The taxi driver, who is in-between
cultures and languages, not quite American and yet not quite Pakistani,
inhabits an in-between locus or rather sees himself probably as a lot
more foreign than he really is. In his one-page-long outburst of insults,
he seems to revert to his former identity, trying to trick others and him-
self into thinking that he is from somewhere else. However, when he
confesses that he never goes to the mosque and that his speech about
the jihad is but a game, he admits that he is not so much out of place as
out of language and that whatever he says is disconnected from deeper
meaning. This passage thus invites us to reflect on the consequences
of the disjunction between verbal utterances and meaning, and poten-
tially between language and ethics.
Interestingly enough, what happens to the Urdu language in this pas-
sage is even more likely to happen to English. In a context of spatial and
cultural displacement, language – whether it be the new language in the
case of a newly arrived immigrant or the second language in the case
of the cab driver who comes from a country where English is an official
language – has an ambiguous status. Because it is not the language of
affect and deep cultural and traditional roots, and is not considered in
the same way as the mother tongue, it can potentially become a tool
severed from affects and ethics. In other words, it can become merely
instrumental and devoid of depth so that words can circulate on the
surface and convey meaning without striking an emotional chord in
the speaker.6 It can remain at the outer limits of consciousness to such
an extent that it can easily say almost anything since the emotional and
moral implications seem to belong to another realm, as I shall discuss
further in the next chapter on language and the diasporic subject.
To return to my initial question, ‘what happens to the immigrant as
an ethical and political subject?’, the example of Fury provides one of
the more enlightening examples of the disjunctive process generated
by bilingualism. In this novel, rather than focusing on the incredible
fluidity of meaning which is self-produced and multi-faceted like in
The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie imagines the potential incoher-
ence of individuals whose words become divorced from their thoughts
and sense of ethics. Fury thus expresses the necessity of reconnecting
words and meaning, signifiers with affect and ethics, and to revitalize
languages which, when severed from their initial context can cease to
make sense and cease to appeal to the full humanness in each of us.
Although English is represented as some sort of lingua franca, what is
stressed is not so much the commonality between speakers as the differ-
ences. The verbal vignettes and the fragments of conversations that are
interspersed throughout the novel form a kind of auditory quilt which
evokes the ruggedness of linguistic clashes through the widespread use
of English; they emanate from split selves who say one thing and think
another, and this constitutes a heightened form of linguistic schizo-
phrenia (Deleuze, 1998).7
Deterritorialization and the sheer

‘nakedness of human rights’
If they pinpoint the clash between two sets of ethical values and raise
the alarm as to the diffraction of in-betweeners as ethical subjects, such
novels also address the key difficulty and probably main challenge
facing the meta-community of today’s transnational world, that of try-
ing to come up with an ethics for this meta-community and conceive
of rights as human rights rather than merely as the rights endowed by
citizenship or residence in a given country.
In the introduction to this chapter I have briefly referred to the recur-
rence of this issue ever since the eighteenth century; its timeliness in
the twentieth century was largely demonstrated by Hannah Arendt in
her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) in which she historicizes
the question of minorities and rights. Her focus, which is mainly on

Jews, reaches beyond the scope of a specific community to show how
the rights of individuals and of groups of individuals are dependent
on a site of validation, and acknowledgement, which guarantees their
enforcement. It is in this sense that Arendt writes that ‘the world found
nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.’ Arendt’s
position takes its cue from the pragmatic approach of Edmund Burke
and his insistence on a conception of rights as grounded in and tied
to citizenship. Burke’s scepticism about the French revolution and the
Declaration of the Rights of Man stemmed not so much from a rejec-
tion of the concept of human rights as such, as from a firm belief that
such abstractions are not needed whenever the rights are guaranteed by
the state. To a certain extent Arendt’s thinking with respect to rights
draws our attention to a key issue: the interdependence of rights and
the state. Hence her famous statement: ‘we are not born equal; we
become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision
to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights’ (Arendt, 1951, 301). From
which it results that minorities need to be given rights – as opposed
to priv ileges – within the national framework in which they live. The
absence of any guarantee may cause minorities to slip through the net
when international agreements and treaties of reciprocity which allow
for the reterritorialization of national rights in a context of migration
are being drawn up. Arendt contends that one of the symptoms of the
degradation of the status of displaced populations is precisely the ter-
minological shift from ‘stateless’ (which implied that as such these
minorities did not enjoy the protection of a state and had to be looked
after by international instances) to ‘displaced’, which does not entail
the same call for responsibility.
Arendt historicizes this debate from the birth to the erosion of the
nation state. Such a line of argument could easily be extended to today’s
context of increased transnationalism. To a certain extent, the idea that
rights need to be grounded and determined locally is an interesting
entry point into understanding the way rights of diasporic populations
are redistributed and redefined in today’s context of global capitalism.
Deleuze’s idea of a deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the
fluxes of capitalism may well be applied to the way the rights of individ-
uals become negotiated and converted or not in the global order which
rules mass migrations. Not only is the continuity individuals/citizen/
rights/nation realigned, this is done in such a way that the individual
finds himself with conditional rights often given on a temporary basis,
for as long as the system has an interest in using him/her. I propose to
discuss this idea in relation to Kunzru’s novel Transmission, to which I

have already referred in the previous chapter.
In Transmission, the question of rights crops up on several occasions
as the protagonist cannot help but compare his situation to that of
American citizens who have ‘a natural right to the labour market.’ The
expression ‘natural rights’ is interesting in that it points to the abysmal
divide between a conception of society where laws are meant to guaran-
tee, or at least get as close as possible to the perfection of ‘natural rights,’
and the casualization of rights described by Kunzru in his novel. In
the context of international migrations which goes hand in hand with
global capitalism, rights are made and unmade, deterritorialized and
reterritorialized according to the rules of the market. Because Indians
constitute cheap labour on the American job market, Arjun the protag-
onist, is given a work visa to work in the United States as a computer
analyst, but soon finds himself obliged to work for a very small wage
and is turned into a sort of modern slave by the provisionality of his
rights. His work visa ties him to an employer without which he loses his
right to even be in the United States. In other words, he his only granted
temporary rights which make him officially a second-class citizen who
can be disposed of at any time and who is used in a specific context to
generate profit. What is also significant is the impact of power struggle
on a global and worldwide level in the redistribution of rights since
Arjun would rather be a second-class citizen in what he considers as a
first-class country, than a first-class citizen in a second-class country.
Kiran Desai addresses a similar theme in her novel The Inheritance
of Loss which also deals with the difficulties of immigration. Contrary
to Arjun, who was given a visa before entering the United States, Biju
enters the United States on a tourist visa, hoping to get a job and one
day to be entitled to a green card. Biju is a good example of im/migrants
who slip through the net of administrative systems and are denied
basic rights to decent accommodation and medical care. The following
extract narrates in the tragic-comic mode the character’s fall – in both
the literal and metaphorical sense of the term – as he skids on some rot-
ten spinach in the kitchen of the restaurant where he works and finds
himself obliged to take unpaid leave and nurse his broken leg without
medical care:
In the Gandhi Café, a little after three years from the day he’d
received his visa, the luckiest boy in the whole world skidded on
some rotten spinach in Harish-Harry’s kitchen, streaked forward in a
slime green track and fell with a loud popping sound. It was his knee.
He couldn’t get up.
‘Can’t you get a doctor?’ He said to Harish-Harry after Saran and Jeev
had helped him to his mattress between the vegetables.
‘Doctor!! Do you know what is medical expense in this country?!’
‘It happened here. Your responsibility.’
‘My responsibility!’ Harish-Harry stood over Biju, enraged. ‘You slip
in the kitchen. If you slip on the road, then who would you ask,
hm?’ [...]
‘Without us living like pigs,’ said, Biju, ‘what business would you have?
This is how you make your money, paying us nothing because you
know we can’t do anything, making us work day and night because
we are illegal. Why don’t you sponsor us for our green card?’ (187–8)
The interest of Desai’s approach lies in her scathing criticism of

diasporians and of Westerners alike. Indeed, rather than putting the
blame on imperialism or on capitalism alone, Desai adopts a much
more nuanced approach which pinpoints the complicity of diasporians
like Harish Harry, who is only too happy to embrace the values of the
capitalist system. If Harish takes advantage of Biju’s lack of legal status
and rights, she also describes Biju as giving in to this system and embra-
cing the egocentric ethos of the West, refusing to help some friends of
his father sent to him from Kalimpong.
Desai’s approach to the question of the rights of im/migrants is very
much tied to the community or rather the erosion of the community
as a site of enforcement of rights. What she points at more generally is
the dissolution of all ties into a liquid matrix of pseudo-relations which
dissolve as soon as they are formed. Her description of ‘the shadow class
condemned to movement’ (102) and doomed to a life of forced fluid-
ity and dotted trajectories is very similar to Bauman’s ‘liquid world.’
It is a semi-existing community of loosely-knit links which are made
and unmade and which as such cannot be a site for collective political
action.
As for her depiction of post-independence India, she describes the
insurmountable heterogeneity of a society divided by caste struggle
and in which the centrifugal tendencies towards particular interests,
whether they be ethnic or personal, cannot be overridden. Her depic-
tion of Jemumbhai, who became a judge not so much for the sake of
justice as from some desire to get his own back on society, exemplifies
the instrumentalization of justice but also of values in general. This
character also allows her to denounce the absence of rights in a more

eloquent way since Jemumbhai treats his dog Mutt a lot better than his
wife or his cook. The Rights of Man are a totally empty concept in the
society she describes, where the rights you have are either those granted
by your caste, your ethnic origin or whatever rights you have managed
to acquire for yourself.
Regarding the notion of community and collective interest, Desai
depicts a country where ‘the nation has taken over the state’ as Arendt
would put it and where the extended community of the nation is threat-
ened by nationalist struggle. One of the two main plots is set in the
1960s and recounts the struggle of the GNLF for the rights of the Nepali
who have become a minority in Nepal. Desai’s critical stance there-
fore goes beyond an indictment of imperialism and capitalism to depict
a society where violence breeds violence and where rights are always
conditional and frail, constantly challenged by the epistemic violence
generated by the caste system or by the inequities in gender relations.
Both the main plot of the novel and the subplots, like that of Gayan’s
romance with Sai, show the inevitability of violence and suggests that
the lex talionis is the main operating principle.
Reterritorializing the ethical subject
In my introduction to this chapter I have tied the question of ethics

to the ethics of cosmopolitanism as some ultimate principle and pol-
itical ideal, as if the ‘global tribe’ ultimately had to achieve this ideal
of togetherness and mutual respect. This theoretical positioning poses
two types of problems however. The first one, which has emerged in
the course of our discussion, is the utopian, if not obsolete and unreal-
istic quality of the project, which has showed its limits in the twentieth
century with the League of Nations and which the modus operandi of
relations in the global village has proven wrong, if we are to believe
Bauman’s pessimistic account of life in the liquid contemporary world.
Another difficulty lies in the paradigmatic shift from a theory which
has its origins in the West to a projection worldwide, where it may clash
with other, non-Western conceptions of togetherness in a larger com-
munity. There is a sense in which the universalistic stance implied by
cosmopolitanism reflects the tendency towards a homogenization of
the context in which it was revived and theorized. Indeed, the nation
state presents an unprecedented emphasis on sameness and similarity
which is not applicable to other political contexts and certainly not
to that of countries like India, where the univocity of the word India
is itself constantly proven wrong by the ethnic, cultural, linguistic

and historical mosaic which constitutes the country, and from which
it results that ‘India does not have one voice – the voice of English-
speaking liberal secularists, or of Hindu fundamentalists, for example –
but countless voices.’ (Sardar, 2008, 47) The same thing can be said of
the mosaic of British Asian communities, where the multiple identities
of individuals have been further complicated by their interaction with
regional specificities which they have taken on board and adopted,
thereby generating what Ziauddin Sardar calls ‘compound identities’
(Sardar, 2008, 45).
Yet I am not sure that the argument concerning the diffraction of
voices within the larger community of the nation constitutes as such a
valid case against the idea of a common political ethos based on com-
mon values which transcend ethnic and cultural divisions and which we
may avoid calling cosmopolitanism for the time being. If it is true that
British Asians tend to be involved in a community-based structure, it is
nonetheless a stereotype to say that for Asians political involvement is
necessarily limited to community-related issues. Their participation in
the collective political ground may sometimes be less apparent due to
the mosaic of smaller entities, but it does exist. In his comprehensive
account of a journey into the different Asian communities of England to
which I have referred in passing in the opening paragraphs of this sec-
tion, Ziauddin Sardar describes the situation in Leicester, which to him is
the best example of integration and multiculturalism in England, if not
in the UK.8 A third of Leicester’s inhabitants are Asian, it is one of the
most ethnically diverse cities in Britain, but it is also a city where the pol-
itical involvement of British Asians takes place on various levels, ranging
from community issues to local politics and national politics (in 2006,
20 per cent of City Council employees were from ethnic minorities, not
to mention the fact that Leicester produced the first Asian MP in Britain).
In other words, Sardar’s analysis of the situation in Leicester points to the
compatibility of different types of involvements in politics, ranging from
the local community to the nation.
To return to literature, the question of how one redefines not only
one’s role as a citizen but also one’s place in the world has emerged as
a key question in contemporary diasporic fiction. In Kunzru’s novel
Transmission, Arjun’s desperate deed which consists in releasing a com-
puter virus which blocks a whole array of systems worldwide can be
read not only as some desperate attempt on the part of a madman, but
as a cry from the heart which betrays the character’s sense of his lack of
substance and consequence, his lack of a voice that can be heard locally
but also more broadly. Or in Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane, Chanu’s
disappointment with the internet and the promise it seemed to offer
of belonging to a broader community leads him to invest himself in
a more modest project, that of building up a collection of books in
Bengali; in other words, his involvement in local projects promoting
the home culture is more symptomatic of a failure to find his place in a
broader structure than a statement in favour of particularism and com-
munitarianism. In both cases, what comes out is not so much the help-
lessness of the characters, as the expression of the difficulties they have
in translating whatever social and political voice they might have into
a new context. This question, which is ultimately linked principally to
the semiotics of the social fabric, connects up with that of their social
status and the difficulties they might have in translating that status
into a new system where the codes of social validation and recognition
are different.
From which it follows that before envisaging the global level of the
world citizen, the question of reterritorialization needs to be addressed
according to several stages, the first one being how one reterritorializes
oneself in the host culture, not only solving whatever identity issues
one might have but asserting one’s existence as a citizen, with a social
status and a voice. Indeed, there is no point in imagining oneself a
citizen of a global village when one does not even feel like a full mem-
ber of a given community. Only then, when this political grounding is
achieved can the second stage take place. In other words, the idea of a
‘global tribe’ is neither an obsolete question nor a utopia, but it requires
a political reterritorialization as a prerequisite.
The question of social reterritorialization also implies two pre-
requisites: first, that the migrant should understand the core values of
the society he is trying to become part of. By the term ‘core values’
(Smolicz)9 I am referring to studies which have tackled the issue of the
specificity of the ethos of a given society and analysed it in terms of
a combination of values essential to it (Driedger, 1975). Interestingly
enough, the fact that the core values are so deeply ingrained in the im/
migrants makes the grammar of integration opaque if not unreadable,
and the perfect integration of the immigrant a lot more difficult than it
might seem, and not only tied to language skills or professional skills.
The second parameter involved is the translation of one’s social value
into the host culture, a process which, because of the irreducibility of
the core values of both cultures involved (that of the im/migrant and
that of the host country), requires that one not only acts the way one
used to in one’s home culture but succeeds in translating one’s social
status in accordance with the process of validation of the host culture,

a process I propose to refer to as transvalence.
The difficulties of this social in-depth rerooting have crystallized into
an emerging theme in contemporary diasporic literature. The following
discussion proposes to analyse Zadie Smith’s representation of the com-
plex grammar of transvalence in her novel White Teeth10 in the light
of Emmanuel Renault’s theory of what he calls ‘mépris social,’ which
could be translated as ‘social devaluation’ or ‘lack of social esteem’.
In his analysis of the origins and workings of what he terms ‘la recon-
naissance sociale’ (recognition and validation by society) and which
draws on the findings and methodology of the Frankfurt School,
Renault identifies three spheres of recognition. The first one is that of
peers (like friends and family), whose role is to validate the existence
of an individual within a network or group to which he belongs. The
second sphere is the workplace, where an individual, by doing a cer-
tain job, receives confirmation that he is useful to society and actually
contributes to something. And the third and last sphere is that of the
nation, an even larger group of citizens who all share the same prin-
ciples and have the same rights, and who therefore constitute another
type of peer group of sorts.11
Interestingly enough, in the case of immigrants the level of social val-
idation granted by peers, and in particular those belonging to the first
circle (family and friends) is made slightly more complicated by the fact
that peers belonging to the first category often occupy a peripheral pos-
ition. The episode of Samad’s affair with his son’s music teacher points
to the importance of social recognition and it gradually emerges that
what is at stake is not only a game of seduction between a middle-aged
Asian man and a young English woman but a more complex process
of validation and recognition through a relationship with a peer from
the host country. Postcolonial critics have often stressed the trope of
physical pairing as a metaphor for integration into a country. The case
of Samad combines such elements with a more social dimension which
goes beyond the simple trope of possessing the white woman. If the
narrative of his encounter with Poppy lays emphasis on her physical
appearance and more precisely on the fact that she is white, with red
hair and freckles, almost stereotypically English (131), Smith insists on
her status and on the importance it has in Samad’s eyes. She is also
a school teacher, and as such is obviously educated and with profes-
sional skills which have been acknowledged by the educational system.
The question of social status is omnipresent and constantly interferes
with the unfolding love story. For example, when the two lovers finally
arrange to meet up at her place, Samad is surprised to hear that she lives
in Harlesden, as he had imagined that she had a flat in a nice area like
‘ “West Hampstead” or at least “Swiss Cottage” ’ (164).
The second level of social recognition identified by Renault is that of
work, since one’s professional status testifies to one’s role and position
in society. Like so many characters in diasporic fiction, Samad experi-
ences the cruel discrepancy between his self-image and his social status
and feels that what he believes to be his intrinsic value has not been
recognized as it should. Unable to verbalize his frustration, he starts
daydreaming at the restaurant where he works, imagining himself bear-
ing a placard that says:
I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIENTIST,

A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST
LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH. I AM A
MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN
ALLAH, I’M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND – ARCHIE – AND
OTHERS. I AM FORTY-NINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE
STREET. SOMETIMES. (58)
This silent outburst, which expresses the complexity of identity and the
frustrations linked to the fact that certain facets of it have been effaced
by the experience of immigration, combines various time-frames: the
past as the tense of nostalgic remembrance, which provides some com-
fort to the frustrated soul, and the future with its yet unfulfilled ambi-
tions, whose role is to balance off the mediocre quality of the present
moment. It also combines the different spheres of recognition we have
mentioned: family and friends but also work, and establishes a corres-
pondence between them.
Last but not least, there is the sphere of national recognition, where
Samad fails to find himself on an equal footing with British-born citi-
zens. Samad, who fought during the war and defended the host country
suffers from having been written out of history. The episode of the chil-
dren’s visit to Mr Hamilton, an ex-army man is quite revealing since
Hamilton refuses to believe that Samad (Millat’s father) fought in the
war: ‘I’m afraid you must be mistaken,’ said Mr Hamilton, genteel as
ever. ‘There were certainly no wogs I remember [...] what would we
have fed them?’ (172). Samad’s role during the war is therefore erased
twice: first by his son, who accidentally uses the verb ‘play’ instead of
‘fought’, as if war was some kind of game, and then by Mr Hamilton.
This explains why Samad, in a desperate attempt at leaving some mark
on the pages of history despite ‘the English goldfish-memory of history’

(87) carves his name into a bench at Piccadilly Circus. Samad does not
only suffer from a lack of recognition on a personal level, but also from
a lack of visibility as a representative of a group that has been erased
from the pages of official history. This theme of the writing of history
is evoked on several occasions, in particular when Samad finds himself
in a library, desperately looking for a book which does justice to the
memory of one of his ancestors, Mangal Pande, who had started the
Indian mutiny and whose name came to mean ‘coward.’ For Samad, by
contrast, the fact that Pande refused to give up his friends, proves that
he was anything but a coward. The passage narrating Samad’s trip to
the library questions the objectivity of history and the production of
official discourse:
When Rajnu passed the book to his uncle, Samad felt his fingers tin-
gle and, looking at its cover, shape and colour, saw that it was all he
had dreamt of. It was heavy, many paged, bound in a tan leather and
covered in the light dust that denotes something incredibly precious,
something rarely touched. [...]
Mangal Pande fired the first bullet of the 1857 movement. His self-sacrifice
gave the siren to the nation to take up arms against an alien ruler, cul-
minating in a mass-uprising with no parallel in world history. Though the
effort failed in its immediate consequences, it succeeded in laying the foun-
dations of the Independence to be won in 1947. For his patriotism he paid
with his life. But until his last breath he refused to disclose the names of
those who were preparing for, and instigating, the great uprising. (258–9)
(Italics in the text)
In his analysis, Renault also draws our attention to what he calls the
crisis of the patriarchal model, by which he means that when immi-
grants from traditional societies fail to achieve a certain degree of social
recognition, or when they simply fail to do very well for themselves,
this ultimately undermines their role as patriarchs. In Zadie Smith’s
novel, Samad’s authority is challenged on several occasions, but what
comes across as the most telling example of the loss of his patriarchal
aura, is expressed through his son’s rejection of the name his father
gave him and symbolically of his lineage and cultural heritage (‘I
GIVE YOU A GLORIOUS NAME LIKE MAGID MAHFOOZ MURSHED
MUBTASIMIQBAL!’ [...] ‘AND YOU WANT TO BE CALLED MARK
SMITH!’ (151)). This crisis is presented by Smith as one of the origins of
the quest for new solidarities second generation immigrants often turn
to so as to compensate for both a lack of a locus standi of their own, and

for their difficulty in articulating their Asian origins in conjunction
with their Britishness. The novel shows them becoming part of a group
from which they derive a sense of empowerment.
People had fucked with Ranil, when he sat at the back of the class
and carefully copied all teacher’s comments into his book. People
had fucked with Dipesh and Hifan when they wore traditional dress
in the playground. [...] But no one fucked with any of them any
more because they looked like trouble. They looked like trouble in
stereo. (232)
As a group, they are no longer isolated youths harassed by others but

eventually pluck up the courage to go to demonstrations. The newly
formed community therefore allows them to find a basis for political
action, even if the real challenge remains to convert their action from
that of a counter-force to that of a positive one.
From the ‘local tribe’ to the ‘global tribe’
In the previous sections I have mainly posed the question of ethics

and diasporas with regard to the ethical subject as an individual, leav-
ing aside the broader issue of diasporas as potentially forming a global
community and acting as a political force, an idea I briefly touched
upon in my introduction. Yet this shift in focus from the individual to
the group does not only imply a change in scope, but a paradigmatic
shift which requires that we define the nature of the collective aggre-
gation of diasporic individuals, whereby I mean: Are they a people
(Laclau, 2005), a network, the masses, or a multitude (Hardt and Negri,
2005)? This question has been the object of several studies in recent
years, whose conclusions vary mainly due to the perspective adopted
as well as the definition of the nature of this aggregate of deterritorial-
ized individuals.
At this point, and before venturing into this area which is also a bone
of some contention amongst contemporary political theorists, I would
like to set out a few goals, or rather specify the focus I propose to limit
myself to in the course of this chapter. Rather than pretend to offer a
comprehensive reflection on how the collectivity of diasporic subjects
could become the site of formation of a global ethics and attempt to
spell out some of its principles, I propose to limit myself to two ques-
tions: what are we to think of this aggregation of collective subjects
and does it necessarily constitute a political force? The second question,

which derives from the first, is: how can this aggregation of diasporic
subjects devise a common language and define a common ethical and
political agenda which would act as a unifying principle and help unite
the diverging forces at play?
Hardt and Negri’s book Multitude, which takes up the conclusions
they reached in Empire and focuses on the possibility of democracy on a
global scale, rests on an almost unshakeable belief in the subversive and
transgressive potential of the multitude. For them, the multitude differs
from ‘the people’ in the sense that ‘the people has traditionally been a
unitary conception. [...] the people is one. The multitude, in contrast,
is many.’ In other words, while the individuality of each component of
the people seems to dissolve in the overarching framework, the multi-
tude is closer to what I have described as an aggregate of individuals,
since ‘in the multitude, social differences remain different’ and do not
merge in ‘the masses’. (XIV)
The multitude is composed of innumerable internal differences that

can never be reduced to a unity or a single identity – different cul-
tures, races, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations; different
forms of labor; different ways of living; different views of the world;
and different desires. The multitude is a multiplicity of all these sin-
gular differences. The masses are also contrasted with the people
because they too cannot be reduced to a unity or an identity. The
masses certainly are composed of all types and sorts, but really one
should not say that different social subjects make up the masses. The
essence of the masses is indifference: all differences are submerged
and drowned in the masses. (Hardt and Negri, 2006 [2005] XIV)
One of the consequences of the indissoluble differences which char-

acterize the multitude12 as opposed to the masses is that rather than
moving in one direction and as a body of collected individualities,
the multitude remains a jarring polyphony of dissonant voices, which
in itself constitutes a certain potential for political action. However,
one wonders if this force which they describe as a counter-force rather
than a positive one can be considered a valid cornerstone on which
to rest the political project of a global community. In the concluding
remarks to his book On Populist Reason, Ernesto Laclau expresses in
a few scathing remarks his scepticism as to the potentiality of the
‘being against’: ‘it is a matter of being against everything, everywhere.
The aim is universal desertion [...]’ (Laclau, 2005, 240). Laclau’s main
problem with Hardt and Negri’s thesis is not so much what he sees as
the superficiality of their line of argumentation which to him does
not make sense, since one is never against everything, all the time.
It is also the fact that the heterogeneous components which Hardt
and Negri see in the multitude as a category leave little if no room
for common ground which is necessary for political action to take
place.
This question of the common language occupies centre stage in
Laclau’s political paradigm and in his understanding of populism.
Laclau stresses the importance of having a collective language which
leaves room enough for mutual understanding and acceptance. In his
analysis of the logics of the formation of collective identities in On
Populist Reason, Laclau focuses on how the smaller unities which he
calls the ‘demands’ can gather or unite into the group. A crucial role
is played by what he calls the system of ‘equivalential links’ and the
‘floating signifiers’ whose function is to make the apparition of a com-
mon language and of a common voice possible. ‘The transition from
individual to popular demands operates [...] through the construction
of equivalential links. [...] This plurality of links becomes a singularity
through its condensation around a popular identity’(Laclau, 2005, 94).
For Laclau, all the demands are subsumed by an overarching demand
which can only act as the emergent overarching one precisely because
of a line of antagonism (‘the dichotomic frontier’) which helps the
demands develop some awareness of their commonality. Without this
line of demarcation, the demands would remain isolated and fail to
coalesce into a whole.
Laclau’s thesis not only identifies a key mechanism in the construc-
tion of group identity, it also points – in the negative – to one of the
reasons why the global class of immigrants has failed to materialize as
a group so far. Not only is the line of equivalences difficult to find in
such a culturally diverse mosaic of people, the dichotomic frontier has
become blurred and hazy. The circulation of a global culture everyone
shares in but which represents different degrees of proximity to centres
of power tends to blur the boundaries between rich and poor countries
in the global world order and tone down the differences in terms of
hierarchy. The illusion of belonging to an imaginary community and of
sharing in with a supranational culture, which we discussed in the pre-
vious chapter in relation to Arjun Appadurai’s scapes, and in particular
the ‘mediascape,’ is precisely what is problematic since it renders the
whole picture difficult to read and neutralizes the impetus to fight for
greater political and economic rights.
But there is also a difficulty surrounding Hardt and Negri’s opti-

mism about the political potential of the multitude, and more specif-
ically with their conception of what they call ‘biopolitical production.’
For them, ‘biopolitical production not only involves the production of
material goods in a strictly economic sense but also touches on and
produces all facets of social life, economic, cultural, and political. This
biopolitical production and its expansion of the common is one strong
pillar on which stands the possibility of global democracy today’ (Hardt
and Negri, 2005 [2006] XI). Yet if the development of information and
the accessibility enabled by communication technologies contribute
to a democratization of information, the production of a global cul-
tural and political life does not necessarily offer the sort of locus which
would be required for the formation of a global polis. The more pessim-
istic observers of the present global conjuncture may even argue that
one easily becomes drowned in a sea of information and data where one
easily loses one’s footing and that the democratization of information is
far from being synonymous with political empowerment.
But what constitutes maybe the main obstacle to the formation of a
terrain bringing together diverse diasporic populations is the paradox
hinted at several times in the course of this chapter. On the one hand,
rerooting implies a political and ethical reterritorialization which is
first achieved at the level of the nation, as one does not become a glo-
bal citizen without having been a reterritorialized one. This rerooting
implies obtaining certain rights which are granted by a nation, given
the fact that abstract rights are not enough. However, within the larger
community of the nation, there are other platforms which grant cer-
tain rights (Baumann),13 which implies a structure comprised of two
levels. What is problematic is when these two levels clash; for example
in the weeks that followed 11 September 2001, British Asians found
themselves targeted as Muslims and the rights they had as Muslims
were soon outstripped by the suspicion brought on by their belonging
to a certain religious community. The difficulty some of them had in
articulating their Britishness with their being Asian did not originate
in some ontological predicament but in the fact that the community of
Muslims they were part of within the larger community of the nation
was viewed with suspicion by some. While showing the limits of the
double belonging of diasporic subjects, which is too often reduced to
one component, either British or Asian, this example also offers another
insight into the reasons for communitarianism. Communitarianism is
too often said to be the result of a desire for a locus standi and a need for
bearings, when in actual fact it originates in the essentially conflictual
nature of a double belonging and the condition of being a racial and

cultural minority within a nation.
But to return to the impediments to the constituting of a global site
of political intervention, and to end on a less abstract note, I propose to
discuss the resurgence of the community prism and the ways in which
it may clash with the interests of the nation at large, drawing by way of
example on the scene of the family watching the news in Monica Ali’s
Brick Lane and discovering, aghast, the first pictures of 9/11. This epi-
sode provides a telling illustration of the limitations of what Appadurai
calls the ‘communities of sentiment’ (Appadurai, 1996) supposedly gen-
erated by communication technologies, and points out the importance
of the community prism through which every piece of information is
filtered. In this particular case, the power of representation of images
is foregrounded at the expense of words, since Nazneen does not speak
English and as such is not able to understand what is being said. But
interestingly, the supposed transparency of images which make sense
independently of language is questioned as Ali shows that whatever is
decoded is interpreted according to the filter of the values of one’s com-
munity, in this case the religious community.
Because the event narrated has to do with 9/11, Ali can play on both
the intratextual and extratextual resonances of this episode. This epi-
sode brings the Western reader face to face with the reaction of a Muslim
family in front of the television and sheds light on the reception of
the event outside the West. The focal point is Nazneen who cannot
understand what is said on television and merely stares blankly at the
scene played over and over again and whose apocalyptic quality makes
it almost unreal, as if it were a scene from a film. Her rather indifferent
response to what is almost too horrible to be true is contrasted with
Chanu’s worried look, as he has anticipated the consequences of this
episode for Muslim immigrants in Western nations all over the world.
But on an extratextual level, this episode also reminds the reader of
images of kids dancing away on the streets of certain cities in Muslim
countries, rejoicing at what they have seen, having been told to think of
the attacks on the World Trade Center as a victory against the West. In
so doing, it points to the divisive potential of communication technolo-
gies. It is not that these technologies are intrinsically divisive but rather
that their effects show the limits of the idea of the would-be global com-
munity, a community whose only real source of unity is the fact that
people are watching the same television images all around the world.
The now legendary images of the World Trade Center triggered radic-
ally different responses precisely because of the specificity of cultural
moorings; the images of kids rejoicing on the streets sharply contrasted

with those of grieving Americans, and in the middle were British Asians
like Chanu, dumbfounded at the atrocity of what they were witnessing
and at the same time aware of what it would mean for Asians in the
West. As such it acts as a qualifier to the belief that because cable tele-
vision reaches out to most places worldwide, we necessarily belong to
a global community. In other words, and to take up Hardt and Negri’s
claim that what is needed is a political project (‘The multitude needs
a political project to bring it into existence’ (212)), we are at the stage
where what could potentially emerge as the vectors of this project are in
place, but the project in itself is still to be defined.
6
Language(s) and the
Diasporic Subject
The question of language, bilingualism and ‘bilanguaging’ in English-

speaking diasporic populations is a complex issue which needs to be
recontextualized on various levels among which: the way diasporic sub-
jects relate to both their mother tongue and the language of the host
country; the postcolonial situation and the use of English to write back
at the centre; the current status of English at the turn of the twenty-
first century and the question of the function and future of national
languages in an increasingly transnational world.
Let me start with the postcolonial situation as it is, from a histor-
ical point of view at least, the most obvious starting point. The fact
that English was an instrument of cultural domination and coloniza-
tion and was perceived as such by colonized peoples is beyond debate.
Both the violence of the terms used to refer to its effects on the culture
of colonized populations (Ng̃ug̃i Wa Thiong’o used the expression ‘cul-
tural bomb’ (Wa Thiong’o, 1981)) and the strategies of linguistic ‘abro-
gation’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 19891) used to neutralize this tool
of domination speak for themselves. Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiva’s
novel Sozaboy, whose subtitle is ‘a novel in rotten English’ is a telling
example of the length to which certain postcolonial writers felt they
had to go when writing back at the centre. Saro-Wiva’s writing in ‘rot-
ten English’, which bends the rules of English grammar and crushes
basic syntactic principles is only too indicative of the force with which
colonialism had crushed colonized cultures and clearly spells out the
agenda of the postcolonial writer.
Another question which poses itself in the colonial context, and
which continues to be crucial in that of diasporic literature, is the cap-
acity of the English language to bear the burden of the colonial experi-
ence. Indeed, even in contexts where English was chosen by writers to
125
become a lingua franca in the absence of a common language, as was

the case in some African countries, doubts were raised as to its capacity
to be an adequate vehicle to bear the burden of the postcolonial experi-
ence. The case of Ng̃ug̃i Wa Thiong’o is quite telling. In Decolonising
the Mind, he explains how, when he started writing, the question of
the choice of the language (English or the native tongue) was a much
debated subject, in particular at the 1962 Makere University College
conference of African writers in Uganda.2 To him, the writer who best
embodies the dilemma inherent in the choice of the English language
by African writers is Gabriel Okara who spelled out very clearly the
conditions under which English could become a tool of communica-
tion in Africa, while anticipating the birth and subsequent role of the
new Englishes.3 But one question remained: how could this imported
language, which was also the language of the colonist, brought in by
force, become something more than a lingua franca to bear the burden
of the African experience and play an active role in the creation of a
postcolonial imaginary? Even those who decided to write in English,
like Chinua Achebe in Nigeria, were aware of the fact that they would
have to use a different sort of English, an English whose contours had to
be redefined in order to be ‘in full communion with its ancestral home,
but altered to suit new African surroundings’ and thus ‘carry the weight
of their [my] African experience’ (Achebe, 1975, 62).4
Like Achebe, Wa Thiong’o set out to write in English, but later
reverted to his mother tongue and wrote a novel in Gı̃kũyũ. There are
two main reasons to Wa Thiong’o’s change of mind which he theorized
in Decolonising the Mind: one has to do with the fact that English cannot
bear the burden of collective memory. As he explains:
Languages in their particular forms arise historically as social needs.

Over a time, a particular system of verbal signposts comes to reflect
a given people’s historical consciousness of their own struggles with
nature and with one another. Their language becomes the memory
bank of their collective struggles. Such a language comes to embody
both continuity and change in their historical consciousness. [...] To
so annihilate a language is tantamount to destroying that people’s
collective memory bank in their past achievements and failures, say
their experience over time, which forms the basis of their identity as
a people. (Wa Thiong’o, 1997 [1981] 57)
Another reason has to do with the fact that because Nigerian children
were taught English at school, Gı̃kũyũ remained the language spoken at
Language(s) and the Diasporic Subject 127
home. This created a situation of de facto compartmentalization which

reflected back on the function each language came to fulfill for the
Nigerian child. English became the language of intellectual achieve-
ment, while Gı̃kũyũ remained the language of affect. Ng̃ug̃i tells an
interesting anecdote about the way certain words come to have their
full meaning in the mother tongue, as if the adopted language only
conveyed some vague impression of the signified while keeping it at a
distance:
Since the new language as a means of communication was a product

of and was reflecting the ‘real language of life’ elsewhere, it could
never as spoken or written properly reflect or imitate the real life of
that community. This may in part explain why technology always
appears to us as slightly external, their product and not ours. The
word ‘missile’ used to hold an alien far away sound until I recently
learnt its equivalent in Gı̃kũyũ, ngurukuhı̃, and it made me appre-
hend it differently. Learning, for a colonial child, became a cere-
bral activity and not an emotionally felt experience. (Wa Thiong’o,
1986, 16–17)
This awareness of the limitations of the English language as an apt

vehicle to convey the substance of the African experience, provides an
insightful entry point into some of the issues raised in diasporic litera-
tures as to languages and the way the diasporic subject relates to them.
Yet there are marked differences. For diasporic subjects, bilingualism
is not the result of a choice: it is a fact, a constitutive element, which
has led critics like Linda Hutcheon to write that this ‘doubleness’ is
‘the essence of migrant experience’ (Hutcheon, 1990, 9). Even among
diasporic subjects who come from former British colonies, English has
ceased to be seen as an instrument of colonial domination and has
gradually become regarded as a tool of redefinition – whether it be on a
social or on a more personal level. For example, in novels of the South
Asian diaspora, which I will be discussing in more detail in this chapter,
learning the English language is not seen as a loss of one’s native cul-
ture and language, but as a liberating experience and a way of bypass-
ing some of the constraints of the home culture, like the patriarchal
system for example. In other words, it seems that the immigrants’ atti-
tude to what John Skinner has called the ‘stepmother tongue’ (Skinner,
1998)5 has become increasingly ambiguous for various reasons which
have to do with the personal situations of diasporic subjects but also
with the fact that England has ceased to embody the colonial power.
As a consequence, the very notions of mother tongue, father tongue

and stepmother tongue need to be reassessed in relation to the current
context.
But one problem remains, which has clearly been understudied and
which is the capacity of the two languages – the mother tongue and the
adopted language – not so much to express what Wa Thiong’o refers to
as ‘the real’, as its capacity to express affect. The very possibility of being
in two languages at the same time, not only in terms of the mastery of
the language but the way one relates to the world through this language
needs to be reassessed. This issue calls for a clearer distinction between
bilingualism and bilanguaging. Indeed, speaking two languages is
different from experiencing what Gloria Anzaldua has called border
experience in the sense that the latter implies a merging of languages
(Anzaldua, 1997).
This issue is all the more interesting as it ties up with two major con-
cerns at the turn of the twenty-first century. The first one is the position
of the English language. The issue of the cultural domination of the
English language, which was already a moot point in postcolonial stud-
ies, takes on a new turn as English has eclipsed other formerly colonial
languages and is now enjoying a position of unprecedented suprem-
acy worldwide. For some years now, linguists, critics and theorists have
raised the alarm about what some see as a death of languages (Derrida,
1998 [1996] 301; Glissant, 1996, 42; Hagège, 2006; Hassner, 1995, 309)
which may in some cases foreshadow a death of cultures and a triumph
of a global culture which would go hand in hand with a waning and
disappearance of local ones (Crystal, 2000; Nettle and Romaine, 2000).
This situation does not only generate theoretical debates about the
strategies of survival of local cultures but also fears – fears of the dis-
appearance of other languages, fears of a culturally globalized world
where local languages and cultures have disappeared6 – and is as such a
timely issue. If today’s situation may appear as the natural consequence
of the spread of the English language since the colonial era, the situ-
ation is more complicated since the English spoken worldwide is not
only queen’s English and its regional variations, but another form of
English used as means rather than as an end in itself, in the context of
the globalized capitalist economy.
The whole concept of Anglophone culture thus needs to be put in
perspective, both historically and theoretically, and tied to the prob-
lematics of official languages and vernacular ones. But this concept,
one could argue, also needs to be appraised in relation to dead lan-
guages and living ones. Indeed, the case of English at the turn of the
twenty-first century is far from being simple. Historically speaking, it

took years for the English language to become accepted in England as a
language imported into the country by Saxon invaders, so much so that
in the sixteenth century, Latin was still considered as a noble language,
that is the language spoken by the social elite (Talib, 2002). The intro-
duction of English as the language of jurisdiction was gradual (the 1536
Act of Union was delivered in English) and points to the dichotomy
between an official language and a vernacular one,7 in so far as the bulk
of the population would speak English at a time when important texts
where written in Latin, generating a de facto exclusion of uneducated
people.8 Only in relatively recent times has English become the instru-
ment of colonization we have discussed. But at the turn of the twenty-
first century, it seems that two contrary movements are operating in
and around this language. On a global scale, English is, to differing
degrees, the language of four groups of people: native speakers; speakers
of former British colonies (in this group we can distinguish between
people of Anglo-Saxon descent and people who have received a for-
mal education in English and who have grown up in two languages,
English being sometimes the official language of these former colonies);
a third group which includes diasporas in the English-speaking world,
for whom English has become the language of everyday life; finally, the
ever-increasing group of speakers outside the English-speaking world
who use this language in the workplace, in the context of international
corporate capitalism. This diffraction of English implies two things:
English is and has become the language of groups 1, 2 and 3 and is
linked to a reality lived and articulated in English. But in the case of the
fourth group, we can wonder to what extent English has not become
gradually severed from its historical context and culture of origin to
serve as mere instrument of communication, as a glorified ‘carrier of
meaning.’ Interestingly enough, while the first trend which includes
groups 1, 2 and 3 has added to the wealth of the English language
through hybridization and ‘créolisation’ (Glissant), we can wonder if
the increasingly important phenomenon linked to the use of English in
multinational firms does not have the opposite effect in the sense that
because it is meant to be an instrument of communication, the opacity
of the language as well as everything that could impede communica-
tion is erased and English is reduced to its bare bones (Lecercle, 2004).
In other words, it seems to me that one of the questions today is no
longer how to curb the rules of the English language and fight its cul-
tural supremacy but rather, what exactly has happened to the English
language in the process?
The third area of reflection I propose to examine in this chapter is

the more general context in which this renegotiation of the status, role
and nature of the English language is happening. Not only has the
English language become deterritorialized and redistributed between
Anglophones and English-speaking populations; this very movement
takes place in a larger context of gradual erosion of national languages
in an increasingly transnational world. In an essay with a provocative
title ‘What are languages good for in a transnational world?’ Florian
Coulmas raised one of the key issues we are faced with today, which is
that of the need for national languages in an increasingly transnational
world and the fact that not only have national languages lost their sov-
ereignty, they are the cause and bone of contention in many identity
claims throughout the world.
Stressing the identity of language and nation is one thing, but

demanding political autonomy for a linguistically defined group
is, of course, something quite different. Languages have always
been used to establish or claim a sphere of influence. As imperial
languages they have been imposed on dominated ethnic groups by
whoever had the power to do so. A uniform code has more often
than not been regarded as a matter of administrative convenience
for governing a country of empire. However, ideologizing language
is a different matter; and if language can be employed as a symbol of
nationality by a dominant group, dominated groups may, of course,
exert the same logic and make political claims based on their lin-
guistic identity. Thus, while the idea of a national language and its
political enforcement may be said to function as a cohesive force,
the reverse is also true. Language may be a disruptive a force as any
culture marker, and it is clear that the national language-ideology
has bred intra-communal strife and, in a sense, created minorities in
many countries that have established themselves as states in modern
times. (Coulmas, 1988, 11)
In this passage, Coulmas takes another angle on the question of lan-

guage and identity which departs from the perspective often advocated
in postcolonial debates that reclaiming one’s language and linguistic sov-
ereignty is the alpha and omega of emancipation from the colonial yoke.
Coulmas’s reflections open up to a recentering of the question around
the idea that language is a destructive force as much as it helps create
communities. This question, which Coulmas asks from the vantage
point of politics and international relations at the turn of the twenty-first
century therefore calls for a more theoretical approach as to the question

of language and identity. This question is at the heart of Derrida’s reflec-
tions on language – and in particular the way he uncouples language
and nation in Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin – but
also runs throughout the works of Gilles Deleuze as well as those of the-
orists of hybridity such as Gloria Anzaldua, Edouard Glissant or Walter
Mignolo and opens onto the question of how to envisage identity out-
side a centripetal mode, in a rhizomatic mode rather than one rooted in
territory (Deleuze) and outside a pattern of congruence between indi-
viduals, language and the nation (Deleuze).
Mother tongue, father tongue and stepmother tongue:

rethinking the genealogy of postcolonial
linguistic legacies
The way a diasporic subject relates to both mother tongue and father
tongue9 is a complex matter which does not involve personal criteria
only (such as gender or social status), even if the importance of these
criteria should not be played down but is constantly determined by
the political situation and the balance of power between the two coun-
tries the immigrant is related to. In this sense, the redefinition of the
relation between Britain and its colonies in the postcolonial era and
the way the two countries are perceived by the diasporas plays a cru-
cial role. This redefinition of the ‘lignes de force’ between Britain and its
former colonies has had a direct impact on the way immigrants situate
themselves in relation to the two languages they inhabit. More gener-
ally, it prompts a reassessment of the dichotomy mother tongue/father
tongue.
One of the most eloquent definitions of a father tongue to my know-
ledge is that given by Marlene Nourbese Philip in her poem ‘Discourse
on the Logic of Language’ (M. Nourbese Philip in Morrell, 1994, 136).
A Canadian writer of Caribbean origin, who now lives in Canada, in
a country whose status was comparable to that of a colony, Nourbese
refers to English as a father tongue, a language whose function is to
carry a symbolic order but not to express affect, generating in the
bilingual subject a tension between the language of affect, the mother
tongue and the language imposed on him/her, in a situation of domin-
ation: the father tongue.
English
is my mother tongue.
A mother tongue is not

not a foreign lan lan lang
Language
l/anguish
anguish
– a foreign anguish.
English is
my father tongue.
A father tongue is
a foreign language,
therefore English is
a foreign language
not a mother tongue
[...]. (M. Nourbese Philip in Morrell, 1994, 136)
The style and structure of this poem suggest the extremely painful
process which consists in unearthing the mother tongue and make it
resurface from beneath the father tongue. In the accompanying jour-
nal she kept when working on ‘She Tries Her Tongue’, Nourbese Philip
describes the process which consists in unearthing the mother tongue
from beneath the father tongue which will ultimately allow her to get
to what she calls the ‘essence’:
I am laying claims to two heritages – one very accessible, the other

hidden. The apparent accessibility of European culture is danger-
ous and misleading especially what has been allowed to surface and
become de rigueur. To get anything of value out of it, one has to
mine, very, very deeply and only after that does one begin to see the
connections and linkages with other cultures. (M. Nourbese Philip
in Morrell, 1994, 103)
For M Nourbese Philip, English is not only a father tongue which has
imposed a new signifying system and fails to express affect; it also
bars access to the mother tongue which one has to literally dig up and
‘mine for,’ a metaphor which not only suggests erasure and oblivion but
also burial and links up with the history of slavery which underpins
Nourbese’s work on both a thematic and a formal level. The expres-
sion ‘mother tongue’ is to be taken at face value,10 and this continuity
mother/tongue/language inscribes language at the heart of the body as
both a physical and a cognitive activity.
In the same way that power relations between colonizing nations and
their colonies have evolved, the status, role and representation of the
English language have changed and the whole genealogy of linguistic
legacies needs to be re-evaluated. In the next section I propose to discuss
how English has not only ceased to be a father tongue but is increas-
ingly seen as a stepmother tongue, an outside element added without
it threatening the organic whole and whose relation to the speaker is
potentially more distant.
The case of the stepmother tongue in Brick Lane by Monica Ali

Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane,11 to which I have already referred, offers an
interesting example of the way the linguistic genealogy is redefined in a
diasporic context. To a certain extent, Nazneen, the heroine, and her hus-
band Chanu embody the difference between the diasporic subject and the
postcolonial one in the sense that while Chanu constantly situates himself
in a postcolonial perspective and continues to think of England in terms
of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ some thirty-seven years after he has left Bangladesh,
Nazneen is rather neutral and has no misgivings towards the culture
or language of the host country, which she sees more as a stepmother
tongue, a language which has no claim over her and which, as such, does
not pose a threat to her identity and self-representation. This difference
in attitudes is not only to be explained in a diachronic perspective, as the
consequence of the age difference between Chanu and his wife, and the
larger context of the redefinition of the relationship between Britain and
its former colonies in post-independence years; it also has to do with the
possibilities in store for Nazneen in a country where she feels less pressu-
rized by the patriarchal society she comes from.
In this novel, not only does Monica Ali describe and chronicle the
development of the ties Nazneen gradually forms with the English lan-
guage, it also foregrounds the role of cross-cultural representations and
of the imaginary in matters related to language. In other words, what
matters is not so much what the English language does or does not do
for Nazneen as the way it is perceived and invested with new possibil-
ities. Because she does not actually speak English when she settles in
England, and has never had to learn it at school, she has never experi-
enced the ‘cultural bomb’ I referred to in the introduction to this chap-
ter, or at least has never been aware of it. Chanu, on the other hand,
is a perfect example of the colonial child who has had to learn English
literature, which he still likes to quote, as a way of showing that he is
educated and even sometimes to comfort himself when he feels disem-
powered and frustrated by the experience of immigration.
In this context, Nazneen’s relation to the English language is presented

as neutral. At the outset of the novel, she even suspects the English lan-
guage of being disempowering, probably because she projects her hus-
band’s own frustrations onto it,12 as well as her own lack of confidence
as a young uneducated girl married to an older man who bars her access
to education in the UK. Indeed, even in her own language, Nazneen
is said to lack confidence and to be self-conscious. The first stage of
her relation to the English language is best embodied in the episode
which describes her looking at signs on the streets. Wherever she looks,
Nazneen sees signs which only tell her what not to do: ‘The notice said:
No Smoking, No Eating, No Drinking. All the signs, thought Nazneen,
only tell you what not to do’ (46).
Another point which needs to be mentioned before turning to the
discussion of the way Nazneen comes to fantasize over the English lan-
guage, is her relation to other languages like Arabic, which she does not
speak, but which remind her of home. Although she does not actually
speak Arabic, she knows some surats and is fascinated by the physical
appearance of the Qur’an in Arabic which to her verges on the sacred.
What is more, she relates differently to the Bengali and to the Arabic
versions of the Qur’an.
In this context, the English language, which has no claim over her
whatsoever and which she does not even resent for being the language
of the colonists soon appears to her to offer a wealth of new possibil-
ities. She soon starts to envy the facility with which other immigrants,
more articulate than her have appropriated the language of the host
country. She overestimates their skills and fantasizes over the power
given by the adopted tongue. A good example of that is Karim, the mid-
dle man who provides her with some work and acts as an intermediary
between the garment factory and herself. This young man, also from
Bangladesh, was born in England. With his jeans and his cell phone, he
represents a perfect hybrid of both worlds, which leads her to overesti-
mate his mastery of the English language. One day, she notices that for
some reason he stammers in Bengali, which is something he never does
in English, and she consequently forms a theory according to which
the new language one speaks in one’s country of adoption is a language
in which one is more confident and a lot more fluent. Only at the end
of the book does Nazneen realize that despite all the markers of inte-
gration, Karim stammered because he was in love with her and was
consequently very shy. When he confesses to her that he stammered
in both languages, but that Nazneen did not notice that he stammered
in English, she is surprised. What is interesting is that as a woman,
trapped in the conventions of a traditional Bangladeshi community,

she projects a whole world of repressed desires and mad fantasies onto
the English language. The language of the adopted country, which she
does not speak but would like to learn and in which some of her fellow
countrymen seem so at ease, is romanticized and becomes more than
an instrument of communication or a conveyor of meaning. It becomes
literally a tool of liberation.
As she learns British codes of behaviour, the English language, and
as she grows more confident, Nazneen also develops her hermeneutic
skills and becomes able to recontextualize markers of identity from
various contexts and assess the degree to which the hybrid is a success-
ful one. In the case of Karim, she realizes that his recent passion for
traditional clothes, is a sign of the cultural void which inhabits him:
she, who had always thought of herself as an uninteresting, uneducated
foreigner realizes that unlike Karim, she has a locus standi, a place she
can call her own and can cling to, a set of fixed bearings which can
accompany her in her diasporic journey. She also understands that the
reason why he needs her is because she represents ‘the real thing’, a
woman from Bangladesh, a kind of living substitute for the motherland
which he has never seen.
The way English is represented in Brick Lane, and which departs
as we have seen from the more traditional postcolonial perspective
of English as a tool of linguistic domination, is emblematic of a cer-
tain type of diasporic novel written by women which envisages lan-
guage learning as the first step towards integration. Jhumpa Lahiri’s
novel The Namesake, which also features several rather independent
and adventurous female characters, belongs to the same vein and
explores the way women can find a way out of the predefined role
models imposed by traditional societies by embracing English or
other languages as tools of reinvention. In other words, the ques-
tion of the liberating power of the English language should always
be recontextualized in relation to issues of gender and not only dealt
with in abstracto. Moreover, what is foregrounded is the function of
English as a carrier of a new symbolic order, rather than its potential
affective dimension. In Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia, which
I shall discuss in the next section, its absence of predisposition for
intimacy is repeatedly stressed as one of its main characteristics. In
other words, English is seldom presented as a mother tongue with a
strong affective potential, which may be a long-term effect of its colo-
nial legacy, but rather as a stepmother tongue, more distant and less
threatening.
Of bilingualism and bilanguaging: being at home in

two different languages
In the introduction to this chapter I have put forward the idea that the
question of bilingualism and what it implies in the diasporic subject has
been greatly overlooked in the existing critical literature, for reasons I
shall discuss in more detail in the next section. One such reason which I
would like to mention in passing, however, is the spread of a conception
of language as an instrument of communication, which has become
prevalent even among linguists as Jean-Jacques Lecercle has argued
(Lecercle, 2004). One thing that strikes me is that if postcolonial debates
have focused on the epistemological and ontological consequences of
the imposition of a new language, which suggests that the importance
of languages and languaging has been fully taken on board, the wide-
spread use of the term ‘code-switching’ in relation not only to diasporic
populations but also to Westernized populations like the Indian middle-
class is quite disturbing and to a certain extent bars access to what I
consider to be one of the keys to understanding the way hybrid iden-
tities survive in two cultures and are renegotiated by them in a diasporic
context. There is a lot more to this renegotiation than a mere blurring
of languages and cultures. The following discussion of bilingualism and
bilanguaging hinges on this hypothesis: in the process of renegotiation,
cultures and languages are not mixed, they do not blend, but are accom-
modated in different capacities. In other words, the diasporic condition
shows the limits of bilingualism in the classical sense of the term, not
because equal mastery of two languages is impossible, nor because the
asymmetry of the bilingual subject is the reflection or a more general
asymmetry linked to the power struggle of the two countries whose lan-
guages are spoken by the diasporic subject (Mignolo, 2000) but because
the diasporic subject, for personal or historical reasons, assigns each lan-
guage to a specific task for the simple reason that he cannot relate to
the two languages in the same way. It is in this sense that although the
postcolonial framework has lost some of its validity in the context of
diasporic studies, the conception of language which underpins theories
such as that of Wa Thiong’o remains not only valid but needs to be reas-
serted or else there is a risk of lapsing into thinking that language is but
an instrument. As Alton Becker put it in an essay on languaging, there is
a lot more to languaging than simply learning a new code:
Entering another culture, another history of interactions, we face

what is basically a problem of memory. Learning a new way of
languaging is not learning a new code, into which the units of my

own domain of discourse are re-encoded, although the process may
begin that way; and if the new way of languaging shares a history of
my own, the exuberances and deficiencies may not get in the way of
simple interactions. However, at some point the silences do get in the
way and the wording out gets slow and hard. A new code would not
be so hard and painful; a new way of being in the world is. (Becker,
1991, 227)
And if there is more to languaging than simply learning a new code,

the next question is: can we be fully bilingual, not in the sense of profi-
cient in two languages, or with a working knowledge of two languages,
but bilingual in the sense of having the exact same capacities to feel, to
express and to articulate things in two languages?
In Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin, to which I
have already referred in Chapter 2, Jacques Derrida discusses the nature
of the link between individuals and their mother tongue. As we have
seen, his approach is both theoretical and biographical in the sense that
on various occasions, he refers to his childhood in Algeria in colonial
times and to the way French culture and language were imposed on
the population. The burden of past experience and of a history heavy
with affect is important if we are to understand his claim that ‘I only
have one language’ (Derrida, 1996, 2). The use of the verb ‘have’ itself is
interesting, for if Derrida could not deny the fact that people sometimes
speak different languages, they only ‘have’ one, which is their own. But
Derrida quickly qualifies his assertion, adding that this language ‘is not
mine’, meaning ‘I do not own’ it. In Chapter 2 we have seen how the
idea of not owning the language was linked to his view of how the col-
onist, precisely because he does not own the language, has to create a
mythology so as to convince himself and others that he does. And as we
shall see, later on in this chapter, this paradoxical statement also opens
onto an uncoupling of the continuity individuals/language/nation. For
the time being, I would like to concentrate on the ambiguous position
put forward by Derrida which is that even though I do not own my lan-
guage, in the sense that it is not my language but the language through
which I cannot help but speak, this language continues to exert a cer-
tain form of determinism upon me. Because I was brought up in this
language and it has become the receptacle of my memories, and because
I grew up and became whole, psychologically speaking, in this language
and in the context where it was spoken, I cannot fully express myself,
to the same degree of precision and intensity in another language. This
other language somehow does not carry the same emotional charge; its
words do not resonate in the same way as their equivalent in my mother
tongue. Hence Derrida’s claim that
It is on the shores of the French language, uniquely, and never inside

nor ever outside of it, on the unplaccable line of its coast that, since
forever, and lastlingly [à demeure], I wonder if one can love, enjoy
oneself [jouir], pray, die from pain, or just die, plain and simple, in
another language or without telling anyone about it, without even
speaking at all. (Derrida, 1996, 2)
As a result, the process of translation can only result in a loss of affect

and of intensity.
Drawing on Derrida’s claim that we are first and foremost monolin-
gual and speak our mother tongue, or rather that the mother tongue
continues to speak through us – even though Derrida’s position is more
complex than that as we shall see – I would like to discuss the representa-
tion of the mother tongue, the stepmother tongue and other languages
spoken in diasporic situations and raise the question of the possibility
of bilingualism in the diasporic subject.
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri or ‘the silence of the polyglot’

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri chronicles the lives of two generations
of immigrants from India to the US. However, for some of the char-
acters, the experience of bilingualism and that of polyglossia is more
linked to the children than to the parents, which slightly alters the per-
spective. Instead of looking at the new language from outside in, that
is to say from the exterior perspective of the freshly arrived immigrants
who do not always master the new language, which was Nazneen’s case
in the novel by Monica Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri tackles the issue of language
in relation to second generation immigrants for whom bilingualism is a
constitutive element. It should also be said that the fact that the novel is
set in the US introduces another major difference since English is more
remotely associated – if it is at all – with colonial domination in the US
context than in former British colonies.
The question of language crops up at a very early stage in the life of
Ashima’s son Gogol, who soon realizes that his name is nowhere to be
found in his immediate context, neither at school nor in town.13 It does not
seem to be inscribed in the geography of the place nor be part of its sym-
bolic heritage. The idea of geographical inscription has been abundantly
discussed in studies dealing with colonization. The need to appropriate a

place symbolically by renaming it has frequently been highlighted. In his
book Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian
and New Zealand Literature, Terry Goldie studies a double phenomenon
linked to the renaming of places in colonized countries. The best-known
strategy is for settlers to change indigenous place names to European
ones, so as to assert their presence on the lands they have colonized. But
there are other instances of settlers using indigenous place names (for
their companies for example, like Mohawk Motors). Goldie shows that
it is part of a strategy of legitimization which he calls ‘indigenization’
(Goldie, 1989, 13), as if by taking an indigenous name the settler symbol-
ically became heir to the cultural heritage of the first nation. Both strat-
egies are of course artificial but their persistence in colonized countries
shows the importance of the idea of lineage and natural inheritance and
suggests that it actually plays an important role in the process of the shap-
ing of either individual or group identity. This idea of symbolic filiation
is clearly instantiated in several episodes of The Namesake, in particular in
the cemetery episode. One day, Gogol and his friends from the art class
are taken to a cemetery where they are asked by the teacher to reproduce
the inscriptions written on tombstones. As was expected, no tombstone
bears the name Gogol, while the other children revel in the discovery of
their names which are engraved on an ancient stone slab. The metaphor-
ical meaning of this episode is quite obvious: not only is Gogol alienated
from everyday life, he is also alienated from the world of the ancestors and
the cultural heritage of the country where he was born.
Yet as Gogol grows older, he seems less alienated and almost plans
integration as a conscious choice. One of the main steps towards inte-
gration consists in a change of name from Gogol to Nikhil, a name
which does not brand him as a foreigner. The chapters recounting
his teenage years show a character definitely more American than
Indian, who can afford to forget about his roots for a while, one who
has stored up many years of cultural representations linked to the US.
By the time Gogol starts going to university, the question of identity
seems irrelevant and artificial. One day, Gogol is invited to attend
a lecture given by his cousin, in which the question of identity in
Asian American communities is discussed. The following quotation,
which mocks the dogmatism of postcolonial theories of identity and
the obsession of scholars with the question of marginality, stresses
Gogol’s new-found Americanness. It also implicitly calls for a theory
of identity which distinguishes between first generation immigrants
and their children.
One day he attends a panel discussion about Indian novels written in

English. [...] Gogol is bored by the panelists, who keep referring to some-
thing called ‘marginality,’ as if it were some sort of medical condition. [...]
“Teleogically speaking, ABCDs are unable to answer the question ‘Where
are you from?’ ” the sociologist on the panel declares. Gogol has never
heard the term ABCD. He eventually gathers that it stands for ‘American-
born confused deshi.’ In other words, him. [...] all their friends always
refer to India simply as desh. But Gogol never thinks of India as desh. He
thinks of it as Americans do, as India. (Lahiri, 2003, 118)
As was to be expected, the in-betweenness he fails to come to terms with

as a teenager catches up with him as a young adult. Moushumi, the girl
whom he marries, has gone further than him in her denial of her roots and
culture to what could be termed a willing suspension of memory. Because
she neither wants to be tied to a context, determined by her origins, nor to
adopt the identity of the mother country, Moushumi decides to go and live
in France for a few years. There she finds a third place, an adopted country
that has no claim on her. This no man’s land, lacking a real bond or emo-
tional connection allows her to express her personality fully.
At her parents’ insistence, she’d majored in chemistry, for they were

hopeful she would follow in her father’s footsteps. Without telling
them, she’s pursued a double major in French. Immersing herself in a
third language, a third culture, had been her refuge – she approached
French, unlike things American or Indian, without guilt, or misgiv-
ing, or expectation of any kind. It was easier to turn her back on
the two countries that could claim her in favour of one that had no
claim whatsoever. (Lahiri, 2003, 214)
This extract implies that because she has no personal connection to

France, this adopted third space becomes a place where she can reinvent
herself and where being foreign ceases to be traumatic and becomes
empowering. The end of the novel, however, suggests that things are
more complex than they seem and that bilingualism generates a certain
alienation which is not unlike what Julia Kristeva calls ‘the silence of
the polyglot’ (Kristeva, 1991, 16).
This expression, ‘silence of the polyglot’, goes against the grain14 and
questions the assumption that the mastery of several languages is an asset.
Kristeva’s position seems to imply a certain idealism, in the sense that she
seems to consider identity as a unified whole. Yet Kristeva’s position is

interesting in so far as she considers the mother tongue as cementing
personal identity. As a consequence, instead of being empowering, the
ability to speak several languages constitutes a breach in this unity and
prevents the polyglot from being truly at home in any one language.
Not speaking in one’s mother tongue. Living with resonances and rea-
soning that are cut off from the body’s nocturnal memory, from the
bittersweet slumber of childhood. Bearing within oneself like a secret
vault, or like a handicapped child – cherished and useless – that lan-
guage of the past that withers without ever leaving you. You improve
your ability with another instrument, as one expresses oneself with
algebra or the violin. You can become a virtuoso with this new device
that moreover gives you a new body, just as artificial and sublimated –
some say sublime. You have a feeling that the new language is a res-
urrection: new skin, new sex. But the illusion bursts when you hear,
upon listening to a recording for instance, that the melody of your
voice comes back to you as a peculiar sound, out of nowhere [...]. Thus,
between two languages, your realm is silence. By dint of saying things
in various ways, one just as trite as the other, just as approximate, one
ends up no longer saying them. (Kristeva, 1991, 16)
Like Kristeva’s silent polyglot, who bears his mother tongue within
himself like a handicapped child, Moushumi gradually realizes that a
third space and a third language cannot make up for the void left by the
denial of her cultural heritage and that the empowering phase is soon
followed by the bitter realization that the new language cannot allow
her to reach a stage of ontological plenitude.
To a certain extent, the example of Lahiri’s novel is a good illustration
of the first part of Derrida’s position on language, namely the determin-
ism exerted by the mother tongue and its role as a constitutive element.
Another point which needs to be discussed is the locus of the idiosyncrasy
of the mother tongue. Is the message delivered in the mother tongue dif-
ferent because of one’s ability or lack of ability to convey it in another
language, or does this difference have to do with the idiosyncrasy of lan-
guages? Derrida’s reflections on translation and the fact that something is
necessarily lost along the way in the passage from one language to another,
suggests that languages are by essence untranslatable, although the word
‘essence’ falls short of expressing the contingent element constitutive of
this idiosyncrasy and linked to the fact that languages are different also
because they are rooted in different histories and contexts and have borne
different collective memories. Derrida’s position also invites us to reflect

on the fact that a language always resonates in relation to the context it
is rooted in. It does not operate in a context-free realm and on the level
of fluxes of signifiers and signifieds, but develops and expands around
a given socio-historical nexus which is constitutive of its idiosyncrasy
and gives it a specific resonance. I propose to illustrate this idea of ‘reson-
ance’ of a language with an example from Marina Lewycka’s15 first novel16
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. This also implies that the initial
dichotomy – the mother tongue as the language of affect as opposed to
the father tongue, as the language of cognitive development – needs to be
questioned and redefined in the context of diasporic experience, maybe
as the language one lives in as opposed to the language one works in.
Of the idiosyncrasy of languages: A Short History of Tractors in

Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka
The tragic-comic mode of the passage I propose to discuss will I hope pro-
vide a short digression as well as an illustration of what I have approached
from a theoretical angle in the last paragraph and in particular the idea
of a specific resonance of a language. The novel recounts the story of the
protagonist’s father who decides to remarry after his wife’s death. His new
fiancée, a gorgeous-looking Ukrainian divorcée, is a great deal younger
than him, which leads his daughter to harbour doubts as to the true
motivations of the Ukrainian fiancée for marrying her rather unglam-
orous father. Predictably, the father’s Ukrainian protégée soon turns out
to be a passport seeker and a social climber who takes advantage of the
old man and eventually bullies him. One day, the father confesses to
his daughter that his new wife has insulted him and even threatened
him, before adding, as if this were the last straw, that she had done so in
Russian. Of course, for him, Russian epitomizes the oppressor, the Russian
enemy and as such it crystallizes fears and anguish. Although it is uttered
in a radically different context – that of England, a safe haven – this
comment in the language of the oppressor is enough to bring back trau-
matic memories and conjure up a world of past sufferings. The evocative
power of language is thus hinted at and dealt with in the comic mode.
For example, in the following extract, the father phones his daughter and
lets her know that he suspects that his young wife wants to kill him. His
fear does not emanate so much from the fact that she has uttered a threat
as from the fact that the threat was uttered in Russian.
Then he phones me. His voice is shrill and breathy.

‘I think she means to kill me, Nadia.’
‘She really said that, about returning to the graveyard.’
‘In Russian. Said all in Russian.’

‘Pappa, the language doesn’t matter ...’
‘No, on contrary, language is supremely important. In language are
encapsulated not only thoughts but cultural values ...’ (Lewycka,
2005, 139)
There are at least two levels of interpretation possible when reading this
passage. The first level plays on its comic tone and could be paraphrased
as follows: the clucky old father is losing his marbles and starts confus-
ing things. He is no longer able to distinguish between first and second
degree and is taking his wife’s mock threat seriously. Yet there is a second
level of understanding, more serious and almost tragic: this poor old man
who has known oppression and has lived in a traumatic context where
Russian has become closely associated with it, is brought back to these
painful memories by the mere resonance of words uttered in Russian.
Interestingly, the second interpretation counts as much as the first one
and highlights the affective dimension of language in a tragic-comic
mode. It could be summed up as follows: any utterance retains an affect-
ive charge linked to the language it is uttered in, and this affective charge
goes far beyond the signifier. The affective load of the country of origin is
carried to another country, even if the context is radically different.
In the first movement of this section, we have established the suprem-
acy of the mother tongue and discussed Derrida’s assertion that we are
first and foremost monolingual, even though there is a certain form of
polyglossia which I have decided to leave aside for the time being. Indeed,
at this stage, the question which needs to be answered is how to articu-
late this position, taking into account the fact that some of us live in two
languages. In other words, the question which needs to be addressed is
that of the distinction between bilingualism and bilanguaging.
The difference between bilingualism and bilanguaging is a matter
of both location and degree, in the sense that individuals may be said
to be bilingual, when they ‘have’ two languages, but the idea of real
bilingualism, as we have seen, is something more and refers to the pos-
sibility of being at home in two languages, immersed in their culture
and history. And since one can only have one home, bilanguaging is by
necessity linked to the situation of individuals who live what Mignolo
or Anzaldua refer to as the border experience. In her preface to La
Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua describes the situation and the language of
the frontera [border] in the following terms:
The switching of ‘codes’ in this book from English to Castilian

Spanish to the North Mexican dialect to Tex-Mex to a sprinkling
of Nahuatl to a mixture of all these, reflects my language, a new

language – the language of the Borderlands. There, at the junc-
ture of cultures, languages cross-pollinate and are revitalized; they
die and are born. Presently this infant language, this bastard lan-
guage, Chicano Spanish, is not approved by any society. But we
Chicanos no longer feel that we need to beg entrance, that we need
always to make the first overture – to translate to Anglo, Mexicans
and Latinos, apology blurting out of our mouths with every step.
(Anzaldua, 1989, 55)
In this description, Anzaldua points at the fact that the difference

between bilingualism and bilanguaging is not only situational but that
there is a real difference in the way languages interact or do not interact
in a situation of bilanguaging. The language of border living is essen-
tially hybrid; it mixes languages and has a subversive potential in the
sense that it telescopes high forms with lower forms:
Chicano Spanish is not incorrect, it is a living language, for a people

who are neither Spanish nor live in a country in which Spanish is the
first language; for a people who live in a country in which English is
the reigning tongue but who are not Anglo; for a people who cannot
entirely identify with either standard (formal, Castilian) Spanish nor
standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their
language? A language to which they can connect their identity, one
capable of communicating the realities and values to themselves – a
language with terms that are neither espagnol ni ingles, but both.
We speak, a patois, a forked tongue, a variation of two languages.
(Anzaldua, 1989, 55)
However, if the language of borderliving is a forked tongue which dis-

places the borders between languages so as to create zones of overlap
and congruence, bilingualism involves a different process. To me, it
seems that this process is closer to what Deleuze has described in his
works on writers writing in a foreign language.
In his Essays Critical and Clinical, Gilles Deleuze focuses on a set of
texts written by writers whose mother tongue is not English and con-
tends that when writers express themselves in a language which is not
their mother tongue, they make language ‘stammer.’ Stammering in
this context is not to be understood as a failing or shortcoming of the
message produced, but rather as a way of pushing language to its limits
by inhabiting it from outside, from the outside position of the foreigner.
This is what Deleuze calls using the language in the minor mode, in the
musical sense of the term – bringing it close to imbalance through the
use of ‘dynamic combinations in perpetual disequilibrium.’
We can conceive of two languages mixing with each other, with

incessant transitions from one to the other; yet each of them none-
theless remains a homogeneous system of equilibrium, and their
mixing takes place in speech. But this is not how great authors pro-
ceed, even though Kafka is a Czech writing in German, and Beckett
an Irishman (often) writing in French, and so on. They do not mix
two languages together, not even a minor language and a major lan-
guage, though many of them are linked to minorities as a sign of
their vocation. What they do, rather, is invent a minor use of the
major language within which they express themselves entirely; they
minorize this language, much as in music, where the minor mode
refers to dynamic combinations in perpetual disequilibrium. They
are great writers by virtue of this minorization: they make language
take flight, they send it racing along a witch’s line, ceaselessly placing
it in a state of disequilibrium, making it bifurcate and vary in each
of its terms, following an incessant modulation. This exceeds the
possibilities of speech and attains the power of the language, or even
of language in its entirety. This means that a great writer is always
like a foreigner in the language in which he expresses himself, even
if this is his native tongue. At the limit, he draws his strength from
a mute and unknown minority that belongs only to him. He is a for-
eigner in his own language: he does not mix another language with
his own language, he carves out a non-preexistent foreign language
within his own language. He makes the language itself scream, stut-
ter, stammer or murmur. (Deleuze, 1998, 109–10)
This ‘stammering’, Deleuze argues, sends a ripple through language and

makes it vibrate. The stammering repeats the language, reiterates it, and
takes it to a point of dissolution and fragmentation (the rather enig-
matic ‘witch’s line’).
Deleuze’s concept of ‘stammering’ is difficult to describe and under-
stand, while at the same time imposing itself as self-evident to anyone
who actually experiences life in two languages. Even the most skilled
linguist cannot deny the prominence of the mother tongue as the prime
mover, the first linguistic site which never deserts the native speaker,
even he who has been exiled in a foreign language for a number of years.
For him, the second language always speaks in a polyphonic mode, as
if the first degree meaning were heard at the same time as the second
degree; it is in this sense that language is ‘reiterated’, meaning that it is
given in two modes, the figurative and the abstract. For example, even
though our exiled speaker understands the meaning of idioms such as
‘raining cats and dogs’, the actual cats are always more present to him
in his mind’s eye, than to the native speaker of the language who no
longer sees them.
To return to my discussion of bilingualism, now that we have estab-
lished that the nature of the interaction between languages is not akin
to a displacement of the borders of each language but is rather like tun-
ing to another mode, I would like to discuss more specifically what
exactly happens in the bilingual experience of diasporic subjects. In
the course of this chapter, not only have we established the primacy
of the mother tongue, we have also established the importance of the
resonance of a language in relation to the context in which it was heard
or uttered as well as the fact that what happens in two languages is
not exactly similar but different in terms of mode, whether it be in
the Deleuzian terminology of major or minor modes or in my analogy
with the polyphonic mode. Drawing on Deleuze, in the next section,
I propose to discuss the way in which bilingual subjects do not mix
languages, although they like the odd cross-linguistic play-on-words or
occasionally indulge in games of code-switching. But they assign each
language, the mother tongue and the adopted language, different func-
tions, or rather they find themselves using different languages in differ-
ent areas of their lives and activities. In the example of Jhumpa Lahiri’s
novel and our discussion of the case of Moushumi, we have discussed
the fact that the affective proximity, or on the other hand the distance
a language gives us, can be used to accommodate certain situations, for
example by putting emotionally stressful situations at a distance. This
aspect of the diasporic experience, which I refer to as the de facto com-
partmentalization of language, is therefore a constitutive element of
diasporic identity and life.
Languages and the de facto compartmentalization of the

diasporic subject: Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia
With its focus on Cuban exiles in the US, Garcia’s novel turns our atten-
tion to a context which is no longer that of former colonies and the
colonial power, as in the novels of Ali or Lahiri we have discussed in
the previous sections, but one where the potential of English as a tool
for reinvention is pushed to a radical point. This issue is tied up with
the overall theme of the book, the question of lineage and continuity,
which is conveyed through the focus on three generations of women,

Celia the grandmother, Lourdes her daughter who has migrated to
the US, and Pilar, the granddaughter, who tries to reconnect with her
Cuban heritage which her mother has turned her back on. This disrup-
tion of the continuity mother/motherland/mother tongue is a pivotal
point in the novel and bears directly on the way the adopted language
is represented.
The first point I would like to discuss is the potential of the English
language (as the adopted language) to offer room for reinvention. Not
only does Lourdes adopt the English language, she also embraces the
ideals of the host country, its liberal economy, its patriotism, even its
food. Her rejection of her Cuban past has its origins in a wish to dis-
tance herself both from her mother and from traumatic memories of
her life in Cuba, and in particular the day when she was attacked by sol-
diers. She was raped and a soldier wrote something on her stomach with
a knife – obviously in Spanish – which she could not read. This enig-
matic message, written but which cannot be read, generates a form of
trauma which she is unable to articulate in language. A few years later,
when her father undergoes medical treatment, food becomes a signifier
expressing grief. The episodes describing her fits of bulimia clearly hint
at the fact that Lourdes stuffs herself with dozens of cakes and buns, not
out of sheer greediness but in a desperate gesture which leads her to bar
access to the locus of speech and lose herself in folds of fat to the point
of seeing the body of her youth disappear. Interestingly, if English later
becomes instrumental in the redefinition of the self and allows Lourdes
to find her place in American society and set up a small business, its
capacity to express affect is constantly questioned. To a certain extent,
Lourdes is like the foreigner described by Derrida in Monolingualism of
the Other who has no language to grieve in and to die in. She has fled
Cuba and turned her back on her motherland, but finds herself without
a mother tongue which could allow her to express affect.
Another important issue is the way in which Lourdes has compart-
mentalized her life using two languages (English as her working lan-
guage as well as the language she uses to socialize, and Spanish as a
private language she refrains from using but which comes back to her
and imposes itself to her). While Lourdes has broken away from her
Cuban heritage and tried to bury the language which is her mother
tongue, Pilar who is striving to reconnect with it, is already alien-
ated and is aware of the gap which has widened between her and the
language of her culture. It may seem to be anecdotal that Pilar should
envy Lourdes her Spanish curses (‘I envy my mother her Spanish curses
sometimes,’ 59). However, this example is interesting in the sense that it

shows that Lourdes has retained the capacity to express something in a
language which once was the language of affect and which has become
the language of frustrated affect, but a language which still retains a
stronger emotional charge than the adopted language.
However, if Lourdes still speaks Spanish at home, her Spanish has
gradually become some other form of Spanish, a different sort of Spanish
from that spoken by people who still live in Cuba. As Pilar remarks,
when they return to Cuba: ‘the language [my mother] speaks is lost to
them. It’s another idiom entirely’ (221). To a certain extent, Lourdes,
who has been away for so long has relocated the Spanish language; it
no longer corresponds to a socio-historical context, that of Cuba before
the revolution, but has been exiled, deterritorialized and rerooted into a
new context. And as language is not a mere carrier of words, but a mem-
ory bank, it has evolved and changed almost despite Lourdes. This idea
follows on from a point I mentioned in the introduction to this chap-
ter concerning the relation between language and the real, and how to
articulate the universal potential of languages within a specific context,
history and collective memory. At this stage of the discussion I would
like to return to Ng̃ug̃i Wa Thiong’o’s conception of language and in
particular the way he articulates language/the universal/the particular.
For him, languages have a double orientation; they have a universal
dimension in the sense that they refer to universal experiences and
share universal principles, but they also relate to the particular, which
gives each language its specificity.
The capacity to speak, the capacity to order sounds in a manner that

makes for mutual comprehension between human beings is univer-
sal. This is the universality of language; a quality specific to human
beings. It corresponds to the universality of the struggle against nature
and that between human beings. But the particularity of the sounds,
the words, the word order into phrases and sentences, and the specific
manner, or laws, of their ordering is what distinguishes one language
from another. Thus a specific culture is not transmitted through lan-
guage in its universality but in its particularity as the language of a
specific community with a specific history. (Wa Thiong’o, 1981, 15)
Much of this specificity is linked, as we said, to the notion of shared

heritage and experience:
Language is both a product of that succession of the separate gen-

erations, as well as being a bank for the way of life reflecting those
modifications of collective experience in the production and repro-

duction of their life. Literature, thinking in images, utilizes language
and draws upon the collective experience embodied in the language.
In writing, one should hear all the whispering and the shouting and
the crying and the laughing and all the loving and hating of the
many voices gone and those will never speak to a writer in a foreign
language. (Wa Thiong’o, 1997, 58)
In the case of Lourdes, it is almost as if in transplanting the Spanish

language she grew up with in Cuba to the United States, she had removed
it from the socio-historical context where it continues to grow, freezing
it in time as it were, as well as divesting it of the particular texture of
Cuban Spanish in context.
Of the cultural domination of the English language
Discussing bilingualism in the context of diasporic populations also

involves examining another issue which is the redefinition of the role
and position of English at the turn of the twenty-first century, whereby
I do not only mean the redefinition of power struggle between colo-
nial and postcolonial nations, but the changes brought by the wide-
spread and almost global use of English as a lingua franca and as the
language of corporate transnationalism. Interestingly enough, in one
of the essays he published as part of the book Morning Yet on Creation
Day, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe had anticipated the fact that when
becoming a world language, and the second language of postcolonial
writers as well as that of millions of people from former British colonies,
English would have to change and would irremediably be altered. He
writes: ‘the price a world language must be prepared to pay is submis-
sion to many different kinds of use’ (Achebe, 1975, 61). There are several
dimensions to the changes that have affected the English language and
to the way this language stands today, from superficial and situational
changes to more profound transformations.
I propose to start with the question of its symbolic capital which
points to both the transience and commodification of cultural centres
in the postcolonial era, as well as to the frailty of English as UK English.
In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai briefly refers to an anecdote
from the days when his brother was a student in the United States and
he would ask him to bring him back pairs of jeans. Appadurai concludes
that this is how his Victorian England lost the battle in postcolonial
Bombay. It has often been suggested that American culture has replaced
British culture in the hearts of the denizens of Britain’s former colonies
and that political independence has gone hand in hand with a search
for new role models, from which it results that the postcolonial era is no
longer haunted by the spectre of colonialism but yearns for that of glo-
bal culture. Yet if English has thrived and become the global language
we all know, it can be argued that this American English ‘overshadows
the English’s legacy as the language of the British Empire’ (Mignolo,
2000, 255) and in the process, UK English has lost a lot more than its
symbolic capital.
The recent changes in the status and nature of the English lan-
guage are not only linked to the rivalry between UK English and
American English but to a larger movement of diffraction of speakers
of the English language throughout the world and the subsequent
redefinition of the divide between Anglophones and English-
speaking people, even though this dichotomy needs to be further
qualified as we shall see in the course of our discussion. It is a fact
that English has ceased to be principally the language of a nation,
and it is estimated that the number of those who use it for conveni-
ence as a lingua franca now outnumbers by perhaps three to one the
total population of all native speakers (Ostler, 2005, 458). As I have
mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, English has become
the language of at least four groups of people to different extents: the
native speakers, speakers of former British colonies where English is
the official language – a group which can be subdivided into people
of Anglo-Saxon descent and people who have received a formal edu-
cation in English and who have grown up in two languages – a third
group which includes the diasporas to the English-speaking world,
for whom English has become the language of everyday life, and a
fourth group comprised of people who use it for work purposes. In
The Stepmother Tongue, John Skinner offers several paradigms which
account for the different combinations of situation to be found in
the postcolonial world.
An interesting paradox is that if the spread of the English language as
the world’s global language has generated fears as to the consequences
for other languages and local cultures, the strengthening of its strategic
position has taken place over a period of time when its common usage
had started to change, whereby I do not mean the new uses introduced
by the new Englishes like Singlish but the more profound modifications
I shall discuss later on in this section and as a result of which English
itself might be the language under threat.
The idea of the world’s first language being under threat is not
altogether obvious and requires some clarifications. In Le Discours
Antillais writer and theorist Edouard Glissant wrote the following about
the defence of languages:
[C]’est par cette défense qu’on s’oppose à la standardisation, stand-

ardisation qui proviendrait par exemple d’une universalisation de
l’anglo-américain de base. Je dis que si jamais cette standardisation
s’établissait au monde, ce n’est pas seulement la langue française ou
la langue italienne ou la langue créole que cela menacerait, mais
d’abord la langue anglaise, parce que la langue anglaise cesserait
d’être une langue avec ses obscurités, ses faiblesses, ses triomphes,
ses élans, ses vigueurs, ses reculs et ses diversités, elle cesserait
d’être la langue du paysan, la langue de l’écrivain, la langue de
l’homme du port, etc. Tout cela disparaîtrait, la langue cesserait
d’être vivante et deviendrait une espèce de code international, un
espéranto. Si la langue anglaise était ma langue, je serais inquiet
de l’universalisation et de la standardisation de l’anglo-américain.
(Glissant, 1996 [1987] 42)
It is through this defence of the language that one can oppose stand-
ardization, a standardization which would come for example, from a
global usage of American English in its most basic form. What I am
saying is that if ever this standardization were to become the norm
worldwide, it isn’t only the French, Italian or Créole languages that
would be under threat; the English language itself would be under
threat, for English would cease to be a language with its obscur-
ities, its weaknesses, is victories, its flights of fancy, its dynamism,
its reversals of fortune and its variety; it would cease to be the lan-
guage of the rural man, the language of the writer, the language of
your average docker. All of this would disappear, the language would
cease to be a living language so as to become a sort of international
code, an Esperanto. If the English language were my language, I
would be worried about the universalization and the standardiza-
tion of American English. (My translation)
In this passage, Glissant suggests a distinction between a language as an

instrument of communication – which English runs the risk of becom-
ing since it is increasingly deterritorialized and global – and a language
not only as the cement of collective history and memory bank but also
as texture and which bears witness to the social fabric of a given soci-
ety. It is this second type of language which Glissant calls ‘a living lan-
guage.’ This issue opens up a broader reflection on what exactly is a
living language, which is beyond the scope of this study but which I
would like to touch on briefly and discuss in relation to the ‘créolisa-
tion’ and hybridization of languages. The notion of ‘living language’
has always been problematic and lent itself to radically different inter-
pretations and definitions which reflect changes in the way culture is
envisaged, either as fixed or as diverse and hybrid (Serres). Rather than a
rigorous discussion of this broad topic, the following reflection is meant
to pinpoint some of the issues at stake and put them into perspective in
terms of chronology. In his Letters to the German Nation, Fichte gave his
own definition of a dead language, a definition which is radically differ-
ent from the way we generally oppose living languages and dead ones
today, according to the dichotomy: languages still in use/languages no
longer in use. For Fichte, a dead language was a language with broken
and mixed traditions. The fact that this language was still in use, or
had ceased to be used, was not a valid criterion. What mattered was
its level of purity and the way it had preserved itself from any inter-
ference with other languages. Since French was cut off from its Latin
roots before becoming a language in its own right and English became
a mixed language following the Norman conquest, German was for him
the only language through which a continuous link with the past could
be traced back to immemorial times (Fichte, 1808).
If we now combine Fichte’s definition of dead languages (as mixed, as
opposed to living languages as pure) and the commonly accepted def-
inition (languages which are no longer in use as opposed to languages
still in use), we are confronted with the following paradox: despite its
vitality and ever-renewed diversity, English would be, in Fichte’s eyes,
a dead language. If we now return to Glissant’s conception of a living
language as one which is rooted in a given society, which bears wit-
ness to its texture and resonates with the multiple voices and accents
of its people, we can wonder to what extent English is still one and
the same language, whereby I do not mean contextually and with ref-
erence to the very types of new Englishes, but structurally, in its very
common usage. I thus propose to shift the discussion to the internal
changes brought into the workings of the English language by the
people who use it as a mere instrument of communication, whereby I
do not mean the native speakers of the English language or those for
whom English has become one of the constitutive elements of their
‘doubleness’ (Hutcheon) but the ever-expanding group of those who
use English professionally. The following discussion seeks to evidence a
double movement at work in the redefinition of the linguistic contours
of the English language: the erasure of its opacity and of its linguistic
diversity in the context of professional English, and the opposite multi-

layering which results from ‘créolisation’. This issue opens up to a lar-
ger reflection on the survival and reinvention of cultural practices in a
context of cultural globalization which leads to the following paradox:
the renewal of the English language comes from its margins, and in
particular the postcolonial and diasporic populations, while those who
use it professionally, thereby paying tribute to its prominence in global
exchanges, contribute to the erosion of its linguistic potential.
A few preliminary remarks need to be made in order to elucidate
certain terms, and in particular the metaphorical use of the term
‘créolisation’ I make in this section. Although the term was construed
in the context of francophone islands in the Caribbean (Glissant,
Chamoiseau) some theorists believe in the transferability of the term
to other contexts. Glissant himself uses it in the more general sense of
cross-fertilization (either linguistic or of cultural practices) on a global
level and believes in the paradigmatic function of this phenomenon
which, according to him allows us to theorize other phenomena involv-
ing cultural exchanges on a global scale. Another advantage of the term
is that it allows us to move away from the biological metaphor and the
racial undertones of the term hybridity as well as its corollaries in the
discourse on miscegenation (Young, 1995).
In situations where English is used as a tool of communication, it
is understandable that efficacy and transparency should be on the
agenda, which leaves little room for opacity, double entendre, irony
and other uses of the language which involve not only a certain mas-
tery of the language but also a certain knowledge of the culture this
language originates in. This issue has been amply theorized by lin-
guists and philosophers of language and in particular by Jean-Jacques
Lecercle in his book A Marxist Philosophy of Language. This study opens
with an analysis of a translation mistake, which to him is emblematic
of what he considers to be the spread of a general trend to consider lan-
guage as a mere instrument of communication and cultures as trans-
latable and equivalent. Before the war in Iraq and during the period
that the French were arguing against military intervention, The Sun
put out a special issue in French whose aim was clearly propagandist.
The headline read ‘Chirac est un ver’ (Chirac is a worm). This sentence,
whose translation is perfectly intelligible to the Anglophone reader
does not make sense to a French reader, for in French the idea of cow-
ardice is suggested by another animal. What Lecercle shows with this
example is that the very fact that The Sun did not bother to ask a trans-
lator to find an apt translation is proof of a lack of consideration for
language – not only for the English language or the French language –
but also for languages in general. The position rests on the assumption
that language is instrumental, that its function is to convey a message,
and that everything else comes second. This is not the case, and what
The Sun’s translation mistake goes to show is that words cannot be
translated independently of the culture they are rooted in. In his ana-
lysis, Lecercle shows that English itself falls victim to what amounts
to a vast movement of instrumentalization of languages, a movement
initiated by the media but also by certain linguists who consider lan-
guage as an abstract system of words and grammatical rules. Lecercle
writes that ‘to attack the history-culture nexus, the cultural past that
is inscribed in the English language, out of which the English lan-
guage is made, presupposes a conception of language as tool and lin-
gua franca, a simple instrument for the transmission of information
and knowledge, without depth or past.’ (Lecercle, 2004 [2006] 4–5).
As a consequence, the death of languages ultimately amounts to the
death of cultures, which is the reason why it is important to fight the
disappearance of languages, a process which may go unnoticed if we
think that this is just about languages when in actual fact it is about
saving the diversity of cultures and protecting them from economic
but also political hegemony. Lecercle’s example points to a more gen-
eral phenomenon which is the gradual loss of the wealth, texture and
complexity of the language for communicational purposes, a move
which makes Orwell’s novel 1984 almost prophetic, as if English today
had become like newspeak,17 a new language reduced to its bare bones
and whose opacity has been erased to counteract political subversion.
In real life, this opacity does not necessarily serve the same purpose;
one of its main functions is to act as the corollary of communication
with a view to achieving a certain efficacy.
The supremacy of the English language today therefore leads to the
following paradox: although English reigns supreme, it has become for
many people synonymous with globalization and is used in an almost
mechanical way, without evoking the culture it was initially rooted
in. Because it has become a universal language, English is used, trans-
formed and restricted to specific areas; in other words, it is instrumen-
talized and cut off from the affective substratum of the speakers who
adopt it and contribute to it spreading. As Mignolo observes: ‘A curi-
ous paradox is that as English becomes more detached from its own
territory, its grounding is superseded by a transnational dimension’
(Mignolo, 2000, 250).
Interestingly and paradoxically enough, it would seem that if the

English language continues to be a living language, not in the Fichtian
sense of the term to which I referred so as to stress the irony of the
situation, but in the more prosaic sense of developing and mutating
rather than becoming frozen in time, it is thanks to the addition of new
layers which originate in what could be called a rhizomatic encyclopae-
dic growth, a term I propose to elucidate in the following discussion.
This rhizomatic growth originates in groups 2 and 3 of the typology of
speakers I have sketched at the beginning of this section, speakers who
have taken the English language on board but who maintain an outside
perspective and revisit it from a peripheral locus.
My hypothesis of a rhizomatic growth of the English language draws
respectively on the works of Lecercle, Deleuze and Glissant. In his book
Interpretation as Pragmatics, Lecercle sheds light on the complex process
at work in the understanding of a literary text and takes account of both
temporality and the reader’s representations, two dimensions that are
contained in the term ‘encyclopaedia’, a term he borrows from Umberto
Eco (Eco, 1984). Lecercle’s aim is to account for the process at work
when a text is being read and understood by a reader. How does the
reader understand the irony of a situation? How does he know which
meaning of the word he should choose when a word has several pos-
sible meanings, without resorting to the notion of intention on the part
of the reader? In other words: how can we account for the decoding of
complex messages in a poststructuralist perspective, after the death of
the author? There is the temporal dimension to be taken into account:
the word can take on new meanings, have new connotations (Lecercle,
1999; Riley,18 1988, 1). And it is always received by the addressee of the
message who plays an active part in decoding it, in understanding it
in relation to his/her representations (Lecercle). Lecercle sums up his
theory in the following diagram in which he has placed language and
encyclopaedia on the same level as author, text and reader in order to
highlight the active part they take in the decoding of the message:
Author→ Language →Text← Encyclopaedia← Reader
My idea is that if we apply this pattern to the situation of diasporic popu-

lations, we can formulate the following hypothesis: diasporic English will
be increasingly characterized by an encyclopaedic multi-layering which
will take the form of a palimpsest of new images and expressions added
onto the English language and contributing to its linguistic richness. It
will have the opposite effect to that of the instrumentalized English of

global capitalism where language is reduced to its bare bones.
The following diagram points at the superimposition of encyclopae-
dic layers that are characteristic of the practice of the English language
in a diasporic context and evidences the process of telescoping of ency-
clopaediae in the circulation of meaning from speaker to reader.
Encyclopaedia 1 Encyclopaedia 2
Author → ↔ ← Reader
Text
zone of friction
between
E1 and E2
Language 1 Language 2
Because the speaker is between languages, he has two sets of represen-

tations, and maybe more. He has the representations of his language,
and those of the host language. But since he has left his country and
is more or less close to his mother tongue, the chances are that his ini-
tial representations which he has inherited from his original language
have evolved over time. As a consequence, the message circulates in
a complex way. If we apply this to our previous example, the mem-
ory of the trauma of oppression can make old representations resur-
face in a context where rationally speaking these representations should
have become outdated. This creates a zone of friction in the interstice
between the two encyclopaediae as illustrated above in the diagram.
The message can be decoded as it should be. But it can also be decoded
according to the encyclopaedia of the home country, depending on
how close the immigrant has remained to his home culture. The situ-
ation is different from one individual to another, which generates a
certain unpredictability.
One of the specificities of language in a diasporic context is precisely
its opacity. In the previous section, I have argued that the would-be
smoothness of the English speaking continuum is not as simple as
it seems. There are areas of resistance, which survive in situations of
apparently perfect integration. This idea, which I find rather reassuring,
leads me to formulate the following hypothesis: language is not only
an instrument of integration; it is also a tool of resistance, a tool which
itself offers a certain resistance, in other words a zone of frictions. These
frictions originate in the fact that the immigrant affects the language
and to a certain extent works on it when using it. Besides, the language
used by the immigrant is never used in the exact same way as his mother
tongue. From which it results that if communication has become the
touchstone of our postmodern era, language is not as transparent as it
seems – reassuringly enough – and that there remains a certain opacity
of meaning linked to the fact that language – and the English language
in particular – has not yet become the detached decontextualized tool
some would like it to be. To a certain extent, this phenomenon is quite
similar to an implosion of the centre, of a cultural core when it comes
into contact and is even partly appropriated by other cultures.
The representation of English in diasporic fiction offers a wealth
of information which easily disrupts the idea that the language of
colonization continues to exert the same form of cultural domin-
ation it has exerted for the most part of the twentieth century. Not
only has queen’s English ceased to be the only linguistic norm in the
Anglophone world, the language itself has been stripped of its cul-
tural substratum and has become endowed with new representations.
There are two ways of looking at this phenomenon. The first consists
in lamenting the loss of the purity of the English language and in
denouncing its bastardization. But another consists in rejoicing at the
fact that this rhizomatic development of Englishes is an antidote to
homogeneity.
National languages and transnationalism
The discussion of the linguistic phenomenon of encyclopaedic multi-

layering in a diasporic context in the previous section, has led me to leave
aside the question of its ‘rhizomatic spread’ which I propose to elucidate in
this section. There is another sense in which the ‘créolisation’ of languages
(and I am still using Glissant’s term deliberately) plays a pivotal part in the
understanding of identity both in a local and in a global perspective.
In recent years a new issue has emerged which is the relevance of
national languages in a global context (Mignolo, Coulmas). For Mignolo,
the current context of mass migration forces us to rethink the relation
between national languages and territories. Migratory movements are
disarticulating the idea of national languaging and national literacies.
Although I would not go as far as him in the belief that local iden-
tities can be fully translated into English, as we have seen in previous
chapters, there is a sense in which the continuity between individuals/
language/nation needs to be interrogated. As Coulmas has noted in a
discussion we mentioned in a previous section (Coulmas, 1988, 11),
languages can be instruments of domination just as much as they can

be instruments of cohesion.
At this stage in the discussion I propose to return to a matter which I
have left so far to one side, namely the necessity of adopting a paradigm
which does not rest on a perfect congruence. In previous chapters I have
stressed the importance of the diasporic condition as vantage point pre-
cisely because it is situated at the point of juncture but also disjuncture
between several systems. In my emphasis on a non- congruent paradigm
I am indebted to the works of several thinkers. Mignolo, whom I have
just quoted, stresses the crucial role played by transculture because it
‘infects the locus of enunciation, and not just as a social phenomenon
allowing for the celebration of the “impure” in the social world from a
“pure” perspective couched in a national language and in “scientific”
epistemology’ (Mignolo, 2000, 220).
the celebration of bi or pluri languaging is precisely the celebra-

tion of the crack in the global process between local histories and
global designs, between ‘mundializacion’ and globalization, from
languages to social movements and a critique of the idea that civ-
ilization is linked to the ‘purity’ of colonial and national monolan-
guaging. (Mignolo, 2000, 250)
What is ultimately at stake in the way one envisages language is the con-
tinuity between the individual/language/nation. In my examination of
Derrida’s position on languages I have stressed the emphasis he places
on the mother tongue as the primary site of enunciation, in so far as
the mother tongue is tied to the socio-historical nexus we are rooted in.
However, there is another dimension to his reflections which is the fact
that there is always an element of polyglossia in a person’s monolingual-
ism. To a certain extent, this idea runs through the work of Deleuze and
of Glissant who develops it in Le Discours Antillais when he writes that
L’écrivain contemporain, l’écrivain moderne, n’est pas monolingue,

même s’il ne connaît qu’une langue, parce qu’il écrit en présence de
toutes les langues du monde (Glissant, 1987, 27)
Mais écrire en présence de toutes les langues du monde ne veut pas
dire connaître toutes les langues du monde. [...] C’est-à-dire que ma
langue, je la déporte et la bouscule non pas dans des synthèses, mais
dans des ouvertures linguistiques qui me permettent de concevoir les
rapports des langues entre elles aujourd’hui sur la surface de la terre –
rapports de domination, de connivence, d’absorption, d’oppression,

d’érosion [...] (Glissant, 1987, 40)
The contemporary writer, the modern writer, is not monolingual

even if he only knows one language, because he writes in the pres-
ence of all the languages in the world.
But to write in the presence of all the languages of the world does
not mean to know all the languages in the world. [...] That is to say
that I relocate my language and push it not into syntheses but into
linguistic openings which allow me to conceive of the relationships
between the languages that are spoken around the globe today –
relations of domination, of complicity, of absorption, of oppression,
of erosion [...] (My translation)
Both Derrida and Glissant acknowledge the double orientation of the

global subject and the fact that he is necessarily bilingual, in the sense
that he has an awareness of the presence of other languages, not as
equivalent to his language, but as each bearing a certain world picture.
For them, this awareness plays a crucial part in the way identity should
be approached at the turn of the twenty-first century, not as bounded
but as open and in a never-ending process of self redefinition.
This conception of language as rooted in but not entirely congru-
ent with the socio-historical nexus it is rooted into and as branching
out ultimately opens onto a definition of identity as rhizomatic. In
the Discours Antillais, Glissant takes up the dichotomy established by
Deleuze between the ‘root’ (which kills other roots and other plants
in order to grow) and the rhizome, which includes other elements in
a composite structure. For him, this natural metaphor provides an
interesting paradigm to understand the way language operates (at least
créolised languages like the diasporic type we have studied in the pre-
vious section); but it also applies to identity, which is redefined not as
something centripetal and self-contained but as centrifugal and open
to alterity. This paradigm is not only useful to understand local phe-
nomena of créolité (although their efficacy has been proved by the fact
that it has kept cultural practices in situations of isolation and strategic
division, for example when slaves where mixed with other slaves who
did not speak the same language). They also account for the way cer-
tain languages manage to reinvent themselves in a context of trans-
nationalism. It is probably in its créolisation by diasporic populations
rather than through its spread as the global language of corporate
transnationalism that the vitality of the English language lies. And to a

certain extent its capacity to integrate variations has contributed to its
unchallenged supremacy. Unlike the French language, which is highly
codified, with strict rules,19 and has always been reluctant to accept
external input, the English language has survived and thrived through
successive reterritorializations.
Notes
1 Paradigmatic Shifts and New Orientations in Diasporic

Studies: Mapping the Site of Intervention
1. I am referring implicitly to Brian Cheyette on the etymology of the Hebrew
words Golah and Galut for diaspora, which I will quote extensively in
Chapter 2. Golah simply means residence in a foreign country, while Galut
implies a tragic sense of displacement (Cheyette, 1996, 295).
2. In recent years there has been an unprecedented development of new litera-
tures written in English, both in terms of literary production and in terms
of the vitality and diversity of the field. Such diversity – thematic as well as
generic – has made it increasingly difficult to chart the development and
map the contours of an ever-changing literary continuum. The boundaries
between postcolonial writers, first and second generation immigrants, and
multi-ethnic writers are being constantly blurred, displaced and redefined to
such an extent that attempts to chart the various trends and devise taxon-
omies seem almost doomed to failure (King, 1996; Skinner, 1998). Conversely,
new labels – ‘ethnic literature’ in the US, ‘Black British literature’ or ‘litera-
ture of the south Asian diaspora’ in the UK – have appeared and been added
to an already long list of labels although without solving the taxonomic
predicament. Parallel to the appearance of these new labels which empha-
size the origin of the writers, is that of the term ‘diasporic’, which has come
centre stage and has emerged as a kind of overarching category used to refer
to first generation immigrants, second generation immigrants or writers of
mixed origins. In the case of contemporary literature in the UK, it could be
applied to first generation immigrants like Abdulrazak Gurnah, second gen-
eration immigrants like Andrea Levy or even writers of mixed origins like
Zadie Smith, not to mention those writers such as Caryl Phillips who left the
home country at a very early age to come and live in England. In some cases,
like those of Smith or Kureishi, who were born in the UK, the term ‘diasporic’
may seem far-fetched, which prompts the following question: is there some
validity in broadening its application so greatly?
3. In Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, Avtar Brah remarks that if
diasporic populations have attracted critical attention (many journals have the
term diaspora or border in their title) few attempts have been made at theoriz-
ing the term, maybe because it is not easy to avoid the slippage between dias-
pora as a theoretical construct, diasporic discourses and diasporic experiences.
4. For further discussion see Alex Weingrod and André Levi Homelands and
Diasporas: Holy Lands and Other Places (2005, 3–26). In their introduction to
the volume, Alex Weingrod and André Levi explain that ‘the “typologists”
are primarily interested in better understanding why and how different kinds
of diasporas have emerged, and they also have a considerable interest in the
on-going dynamics of diaspora – homeland relationships. The “diasporists”,
on the other hand, are more concerned with showing how the phenomenon
161
162 Notes
“diaspora” may contradict and ultimately subvert the internal exclusivity of

modern nation-states’ (7).
5. In Diaspora Criticism, Sudesh Mishra remarks that ‘by 1996 the dual ter-
ritorial pillars supporting the ethno-national architrave have collapsed,
leaving behind an ungrounded milieu or midpoint. Drawing on Gregory
Batson’s work on Balinese culture, Deleuze and Guattari talk of the mid-
point as “a plateau” or “a continuous, self-vibrating région of intensities
whose development avoid any orientation towards a culmination point” ’.
(Mishra, 2006, 83).
6. In an article published in The Times in January 2004 entitled ‘Young, Busy
Asian Looking for Love? Your Three-Minute Date starts Now’ (17 January
2004), Patrick Barkham writes about the explosion of speed dating among
young Asians in the UK and the favourable reaction of traditional Asian
families. In his description of the phenomenon, Barkham points to the fact
that when borrowed from the West and used in Asian communities, speed
dating is not taken up as such but divested of its usual function in Western
societies and reinvented in such a way that not only do families tolerate this
new practice, they sometimes welcome and encourage it, viewing it as a way
for their career-oriented children to socialize with young people from the
same community and maybe settle down with them. Such recodifications
of cultural practices have become the object of recent sociological studies.
7. ‘Diasporic subjectivity is thus necessarily double: acknowledging the
imperatives of an earlier “elsewhere” in an active and critical relationship
with the cultural politics of one’s present home, all within the figurality
of a reciprocal displacement. “Home” then becomes a mode of interpret-
ative in-betweenness, as a form of accountability to more than one location’
(Radhakrishnan, 2003, 1–2).
8. In Imperial Eyes, Marie-Louise Pratt studies the context in which scientific
objectivity developed and gained legitimacy in the nineteenth century. She
decries the fact that the Western model of science became a universal norm
in a very specific context, owing to a collusion between the development of
overseas trade, colonialism and capitalism. For example, she reminds us of
the fact that scientific expeditions were funded by the bourgeoisie.
9. ‘Given the partial failure of national revolution in the so-called Third
World, postcolonial theory was wary of all talk of nationhood. Theorists
who were either too young or too obtuse to recall that nationalism had been
in its time an astonishingly effective anti-colonial force could find noth-
ing in it but a benighted chauvinism or ethnic supremacism. Instead much
post-colonial thought focused on the cosmopolitan dimensions of a world
in which post-colonial states were being inexorably sucked into the orbit of
global capital. [...] But in negating the idea of nationhood, it also tended to
jettison the notion of class. (10) [...] Much post-colonial theory shifted the
focus from class and nation to ethnicity’ (Eagleton, 2004 [2003] 12).
10. This postulate has led me to draw significantly on Appadurai’s typology
of diasporas in Modernity at Large (2003 [1996] 6). Appadurai distinguishes
between three types of diasporas: the ‘diaspora of hope’, the ‘diaspora of
terror’ and the ‘diaspora of despair’. By the term ‘diaspora of hope’, he refers
to the happy few, the migrants whose living conditions are not necessarily
good in their home country but who can afford to move to another country,
Notes 163
to a promised land where they can start anew. The term diaspora of hope
would probably apply to some of the characters of Gish Jen’s novels Mona
in the Promised Land or Typical American, who lead comfortable lives in the
US, have set up their own businesses, and whose children have access to a
good education. It could also apply to the characters of Monica Ali’s book
Brick Lane, which portrays migrants who are not particularly well-off but
who have more or less found a place in society, and still have the possibility
of going back to their home country. The diaspora of terror includes mainly
immigrants who leave their country because the political situation has
become intolerable, as in Gurnah’s novel Admiring Silence (1996) or Caryl
Phillips’s A Distant Shore (2004) which deals with the lesser-known narra-
tive of illegal immigrants. Unlike immigrants of the diaspora of hope, they
know that the return to the homeland is almost impossible and live in a
state of permanent exile.
11. This panel discussion was organized by the University Paris X, Nanterre
on 26 March 2007. Three South Asian writers were invited: Abha Dawesar,
Ruchir Joshi and Githa Hariharan.
12. At the last conference of the EACLALS held in Venice (March 2008) Chris
Abani, a writer of Nigerian origin who has lived in the United States for the
past seven years shared a similar anecdote. He referred to very negative reviews
of his writings on the United States while critics praised the authenticity of
those dealing with his homeland, which he has left for quite some time.
13. For further reference to Rushdie’s imaginary homelands see Victor Ramraj
in Bruce King (ed) New National and Post-colonial Literatures: An Introduction.
Ramraj writes that ‘It is thus not surprising that Rushdie’s work, and quite
often the work of exiled writers, is not realistic. The premises of realism,
which have to do with consolidation or metonymy, are inadequate to express
the voice of the periphery, of a vision shaped by two ontologies’ (208).
14. Manuel Castells draws a distinction between what sociologists have called
role sets and identity. Identity involves self-representation (Castells, 1997).
2 Identity, Interstitiality and Diaspora

1. In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai takes up the notion of imagined
communities developed by Benedict Anderson to account for the current
development of new forms of transnational solidarities which have been
made possible by the development of new means of communication and
transport. These communities, which I shall discuss in more detail in
Chapter 4 not only challenge existing identity definitions, they also call for
new paradigms accounting for the formation of group identity at the turn
of the twenty-first century.
2. In his chapter ‘Hybridity and Diaspora’ (1–28), Young sketches the larger
panorama of the different theories of race in the nineteenth century and
discusses in particular the issue of miscegenation (Young, 2002 [1995]).
3. Riley stresses in particular the contextual multivalence of the term ‘black
woman’ and the fact that it has been loaded with different connotations,
some of which fluctuated with the feminist movement and the represen-
tation of women, and others with the identity struggle of black people.
164 Notes
As a consequence, the term black woman does not evoke the same thing
in twentieth-century America as it does in twenty-first century British
society.
4. This idea is also found in contemporary diasporic literature. In the novel
Mona in The Promised Land by Gish Jen, the Chinese characters are said to be
‘the new Jews’, on account of their education and success story. ‘For they’re
the new Jews after all, a model minority and Great American Success. They
belong in the promised land’ (Jen, 1997 [1996] 1). (See Chapter 3)
5. In this chapter as in the rest of the book, I shall use the term ‘interstice’ in
a way which differs from its usual acceptance and follows redefinitions of
the term by Bhabha (1996) and Chambers (1994). Although the word ‘inter-
stice’ suggests a certain emptiness, a void between two places, the inter-
stice in which the identities of diasporic populations are formed and then
develop is not a void, but is too full, as though brimming with overlapping
definitions.
6. This coinage refers to the imposition of a new self onto the colonized
population.
7. The idea of a ‘palimpsestual’ layering of narratives in the colonial con-
text is developed by Robert Young in Colonial Desire in his discussion of
the concept of deterritorialization developed by Deleuze and Guattari in
A Thousand Plateaus. ‘Decoding and recoding are too simplistic a grafting of
one culture on to another’, writes Young, who then goes on to suggest that
‘we need to modify the model to a form of palimpsestual inscription and
reinscription’ (Young, 2002 [1995] 173).
8. This aspect is studied at length by Rosemary Marangoly George in her book
The Politics of Home.
9. Denise Riley uses this notion to analyse the role of women in society beyond
the divide of home/political life. The social sphere, which refers to a femi-
nized area of operation which extends into public space, is different from
the ‘political’ masculine sphere (Riley, 1988, 51).
10. Until 1993 when the Mabo treaty acknowledged the indigenous occupation
of Australia, the settlement of Australia by colonists had been deemed legit-
imate on account of the fact that the country did not belong to anyone and
was not inhabited (in the sense that nothing had been built by the indigen-
ous population).
11. In Dispossession, historian Henry Reynolds traces the development of the
various representations of the indigenous population of Australia from
the first accounts of the settlement such as the log books of explorers or
the notes written by missionaries.
12. In Fear and Temptation, Goldie analyses the issues at stake in the act of
naming and renaming colonized land – not only by giving Western names
but also by giving native names to new settlements in an attempt at mak-
ing the presence of colonists legitimate, as if they were part of a natural
filiation.
13. It is worth mentioning that Colin Johnson later changed his name, first
to Mudrooroo Nyongah then later to Mudrooroo Narogin, and then to
Mudrooroo as a protest against white Australia. Other writers, including
Kath Walker (who took the name Oodgeroo) made the same choice. (For
further reference to Mudrooroo see Chapter 3.)
Notes 165
14. This character is based on George Augustus Robinson, a missionary who

was responsible for the ‘black line’ in Tasmania. This partition between the
indigenous population and the settlers, which was meant to protect the
natives, turned out to have disastrous consequences and led to the death of
the entire native population.
15. This idea was also developed by Robert Young and summed up in the para-
digmatic redefinition he suggests (the move towards a palimpsestual super-
imposition of narratives rather than the erasure paradigm) (Young, 2002
[1995]).
16. This novel offers an interesting example of how identity can be a product of
a certain context and of the discursive categories that underpin its represen-
tations of identity. Callie’s predicament is tied to larger issues which have
to do with theories of identity and the fashions in human sciences dealing
with identity and in particular psychology. The novel clearly illustrates the
fact that Callie’s choice is not a personal one made in abstracto, but that it
has been influenced by a certain discourse at a certain point in history.
It’s no surprise that Luce’s theory of gender identity was popular in the
early seventies. Back then [...] everybody wanted to go unisex. The con-
sensus was that personality was primarily determined by environment,
each child a blank slate to be written on. My own medical story was only
a reflection of what was happening psychologically to everyone in those
years. [...] For a little while in the seventies it seemed that sexual differ-
ence might pass away. But then another thing happened.
It was called evolutionary biology. Under its sway, the sexes were sepa-
rated again, men into hunters and women into gatherers. [...]
But it is not as simple as that. I don’t fit into any of these theories. Not
the evolutionary biologists’ and not Luce’s either. My psychological
makeup doesn’t accord with the essentialism popular in the intersex
movement, either. Unlike other so-called male pseudo-hermaphrodites
who have been written about in the press, I never felt out of place being
a girl. (478–9)
This quotation points not only at the lack of relevance of theories of sex-
ual identity, whose theoretical stance leads them to radicalized positions
which fail to account for more complex situations. It also stresses the fact
that discursive categories determine the very choices one makes and that
these choices are always tethered to social representations at a given point in
history.
17. The recurrence of the motif of luggage as linked to an absence of homesick-
ness is for Rosemary Marangoly George one of the main characteristics of
the immigrant genre. She writes that ‘the immigrant genre is marked by a
curiously detached reading of the experience of “homelessness” which is
compensated for by an excessive use of the metaphor of luggage, both spir-
itual and material’ (Marangoly George, 1999 [1996] 171).
18. I am referring to Glissant’s opposition between root identity and rhizomatic
identity. See Chapter 6.
19. The idea of negotiating has been used by Homi Bhabha but also by Stuart
Hall who wrote that writers of post-war diasporas often ‘inhabit two iden-
tities’, ‘speak two cultural languages’ and ‘translate and negotiate between
166 Notes
them’ without ‘simply assimilating to them or losing their identities com-

pletely’ (Hall, 1992, 310).
20. In Cultural Identity and Diaspora, Stuart Hall writes that ‘identity is not as trans-
parent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of iden-
tity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then
represent, we should think, instead of identity as a “production”, which is
never complete, always in the process, and always constituted within, not out-
side, representation. This view problematises the very authority and authenti-
city to which the term “cultural identity” lays claim” ’ (Hall, 1990, 222).
21. In an article on Philip Roth, Derek Parker Royal has commented on the centri-
fugal movement of recent Roth fiction and its gradual opening to new themes
and issues which are no longer related to the Jewish question (Royal, 2001).
3 Interstitiality, Authenticity, Postmodernity

1. This sentence spoken by Andrea Levy was quoted by Maya Jaggi in the
Waterstone’s Magazine, 1996, 64.
2. Chambers describes them as follows:
In the migrant landscapes of contemporary metropolitan cultures, de-
territorialized and de-colonised, re-situating, re-citing and re-presenting
common signs in the circuits between speech, image and oblivion, a
constant struggling into sense and history is pieced together. It is a story
that is continually being decomposed and recomposed in the inter-
lacing between what we have inherited and where we are. In the shifting
interstices of this world, whether moving to the acoustic patterns of our
bodily beat and the techno-surrealist design of computerised simula-
tions, there exists the opening that redeems and reconstitutes our being.
(Chambers, 1994, 14–15)
3. In White Myths, Robert Young analyses the fantasies at stake in the con-
struction of the exotic other. This idea is also often dealt with in post-
colonial literature. For example, Australian writer Colin Johnson (also
known as Mudrooroo) often features missionary figures who view the
native population as an exotic tribe from a prelapsarian era (Mudrooroo,
1983; Mudrooroo, 1991).
4. Ever since the late 1960s Colin Johnson, who then took the Aboriginal
name Mudrooroo was a prominent figure of the Australian literary stage
and a leading figure of the Aboriginal literary movement, as well as a very
vocal activist advocating the defence of the rights of the native people of
Australia.
5. In this passage I use the two terms Aboriginal and indigenous. Until recently,
the native population of Australia was referred to as the Aboriginal popu-
lation. This term was rejected by the natives themselves who claim that
this generic term was imported by the colonists and fails to account for the
diversity of the various indigenous cultures. They now prefer to call them-
selves the indigenous people of Australia.
6. Born in England to Jamaican parents, Andrea Levy has recently come to the
forefront of the literary scene when she was awarded the Commonwealth
Prize in 2005 for her novel Small Island, which could be described as a
Notes 167
modern version of Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners, the well-known satirical

narrative recounting the life of young Jamaicans settling in the UK and
their discovery of the Promised Land. Fruit of the Lemon is a diptych featur-
ing a character who goes to Jamaica after a holiday – and a major identity
crisis – where she learns about the history of her family. The fact that the
novel oscillates between two historical contexts, that of immigrants in the
UK today and that of their parents in the post-Second World War period
provides a double perspective on the problem and allows Levy to historicize
the issue of identity. It also allows her to evidence how identity is appre-
hended in slightly different contexts underpinned by different discourses
on race, culture and ethnicity.
7. Fanon pays particular attention not only to race but also to the hierarchy of
racial differences. In Black Skin, White Masks, he is always careful to distin-
guish between Africans and Caribbeans and describes the feeling of super-
iority Caribbeans sometimes have towards Africans. His analysis is also very
attentive to the specificities of the various categories of the race spectrum in
Martinique, from the full-blooded, the half-caste to the pass-for-white, and
he provides interesting views on how identity is articulated.
8. For further discussion, see Mark Stein in Black British Literature (67–80).
9. See also Mark Stein in Black British Literature: ‘The disruption and trauma at
the root of a historical experience of diaspora is not remembered first hand by
Faith and Lara. It is assimilated and learned rather than self-experienced’ (95).
10. Gish Jen is a writer of Chinese origin. She grew up in Scarsdale, New York and
is the author of several short stories and another novel, Typical American.
11. In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler explains how hyperbolic citations work
as a paradoxical reassertion and undermining of a discourse; by reiterating
a normative notion in an exaggerated way, the hyperbolic citation works
against it (Butler, 1993, 232).
12. There are two trends among theorists dealing with the question of Jewish
identity. Bloom for example, contends that the Jewish condition provides a
‘paradigm for humanity’. Others like Steiner argue against such a position
and insist on the uniqueness of the Jewish experience; according to him, it
is dangerous to uproot Jewish identity from its historical context and there
is a specificity and uniqueness of Jewish identity. For further discussion of
this issue, see Brauner 2001.
13. In Erasure, Percival Everett directly addresses the issue and shows that it is
a direct consequence of ethnic policies. The novel, whose protagonist is a
Black American writer forced to stop writing sophisticated novels and write
‘Black literature’ in order to be published, ends up writing the kind of lit-
erature that matches his picture on the cover. Everett openly criticizes the
hype around ethnic literature. According to him, the creation of a new type
of Afro-American literature as ‘the voice of the ghetto’ (Everett) is presented
as having two opposite consequences: if it allows Black people to make it out
of the ghetto, it also condemns them to write as representatives of their own
community and to keep off more traditional literature.
14. Vassanji was born in Kenya in 1950 of parents of Indian origin. His grand-
father was part of what Vijay Mishra calls the first wave of Indian diaspora,
the diaspora of early capitalism, and came to East Africa to work for a rail-
way company. Vassanji grew up in Tanzania before moving to Canada in
168 Notes
1978 where he has lived ever since. It comes as no surprise that his novels –
in particular Amriika, No New Land and The in-between World of Vikram Lall
should deal with alienation, in-betweenness and unbelonging pushed to
their radical end.
15. In an article entitled ‘The Migrant Experience in East African Asian Writing’,
Peter Simatei explains why the Asian community did not find its place in
the grand narrative against colonialism:
The framing of the anti-colonial struggle mainly as an African’s rebel-
lion against the colonial regimes may have contributed to discouraging
the equally progressive members of the non-African peoples in partici-
pating in such struggles. And yet the Asian community were unwilling
to take part in the destruction of a system that seemed to favour and
even sustain their prized cultural exclusivity. In other words, the Asian
tendency towards cultural exclusivism was certainly in harmony with
the colonial policy of separate development of different communities.
(Simatei, 2004, 18)
4 Shaky Ground, New Territorialities and the

Diasporic Subject
1. Homecoming narratives foreground characters who decide to discontinue
the experience of immigration to return home. Such trajectories constitute
an ever-increasing body of texts in contemporary diasporic literature (Ali’s
Brick Lane, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, Hari Kunzru’s Transmission,
and many more).
2. In The Heritage Industry Hewinson argues that ‘Post-modernism and the
heritage industry are linked’ since ‘both conspire to create a shallow screen
that intervenes between our present lives and our history’. History becomes
a ‘contemporary creation, more costume drama and re-enactment than crit-
ical discourse’. We are ‘condemned to seek History by way of our own pop
images and simulacra of that history which itself remains for ever out of
reach’ (Hewinson, 1989 [1987] 135).
3. The link between postmodernism and the post-industrial age has been
clearly spelled out and analysed by Jameson in Postmodernity or the Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism.
4. It would be a mistake to overemphasize the realism of Ali’s writing. Ali her-
self stresses the limitations of her protagonist’s perspective; such limitations
are evoked through images like the Chinese shadows at the beginning of the
novel.
5. By ‘myths’ and ‘doxa’ I refer to both literary myths and the popularization
of findings such as the global village, which has moved from the realm of
academic knowledge to that of the doxa. The frontier is however less clear-
cut than it seems. The Promised Land itself has moved from the realm of
religion to that of literature and maybe to that of the doxa.
6. Born in 1969, Hari Kunzru lives in south-east London. His first novel, The
Impressionist, recounts the tale of a white child born in India who embarks
on a quest to find his family, a quest which eventually takes him to England.
His second novel, Transmission (2004), is another quest narrative but of a
Notes 169
different nature; it is no longer a quest for the past and for one’s origins, but
for a future full of promises, one which takes Arjun Mehta, a young com-
puter programmer to the United States, where he hopes to have his share of
the American Dream. It is a novel which constantly brings myth face to face
with reality, commonly received ideas with bare facts and as such provides
a good example of the diasporic text as a magnifying lens, a mode of ‘inter-
pretative in-betweenness’ (Radhakrishnan, 1996, 1–2).
7. The novel runs two narratives of immigration in parallel, one in the 1980s
in the United States, the other one in the 1950s in England. This juxtapos-
ition of two narratives allows Desai to explore different angles and oppose
the American situation to that of the United Kingdom.
8. Appadurai writes that ‘the new global cultural economy has to be seen as a
complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be under-
stood in terms of existing center-periphery models (even those that might
account for multiple centers and peripheries’ (Appadurai, 2003 [1996] 32).
9. The word encyclopaedia, used by Lecercle in Interpretation as Pragmatics is
to be understood in the sense of a set of representations. This notion of
encyclopaedia comes from Umberto Eco, who uses it in contrast to the term
‘dictionary’, that denotes the system of lexical semantics in a given lan-
guage. See Eco, 1984.
10. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson studied the development of
print capitalism and evidenced its role as an important parameter in the
creation of communities, in particular national communities.
11. Kunzru’s novel revolves around three main characters, Arjun, Leela, a
Bollywood star and Guy Swift, a successful English businessman. Their
place in the social hierarchy allows them to relate differently to mobil-
ity. Guy Swift literally hops from city to city while Arjun is limited to
the crawling pace of the less well-off. They sometimes find themselves in
the same place without ever coming into contact, and it is as if their lives
were on separate tracks. In other words, the world described in the novel
is not only divided horizontally between peripheries and centres, but also
vertically.
12. Above, the restaurant was French, but below in the kitchen it was
Mexican and Indian. [...]
Biju at Le Colonial for the authentic colonial experience.
On top, rich colonial, and down below, poor native. Colombian, Tunisian,
Ecuadorian, Gambian.
On to the Stars and stripes Diner. All American flag on top, all Guatemalan
flag below (Kiran Desai, 21).
13. Augé takes up De Certeau’s distinction between the two. The place being
space occupied by human beings and bearing the marks of human
settlement.
14. In Liquid Modernity, Bauman refers to the respective definitions of liquids
and fluids given by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but goes on to use the two
terms as synonymous, and deploys the idea of fluidity as the leading meta-
phor for the ‘present stage of the modern era’ (2).
15. I would like to point out that Bauman anticipates the argument that flu-
idity is not peculiar to postmodern times and that it is also one of the
170 Notes
characteristics of modernity. Yet to him it is the essence of postmodern

times. It is as if there were a consensus or even an intimate awareness that
nothing would be solid anymore.
‘Modern times found the pre-modern solids in a fairly advanced state
of disintegration; and one of the most powerful motives behind the urge
to melt them was the wish to discover or invent solids of – for a change –
lasting solidity, a solidity which one could trust and rely upon and which
would make the world predictable and therefore manageable’ (Bauman,
Liquid Love, 3).
16. In his book After Theory, Terry Eagleton writes that one of the characteristics
of postmodernity is the fact that objects have become less important than
discourse, that the discourse around the objects has become more import-
ant than the objects themselves.
5 Disjunction, Ethics and the Diasporic Subject

1. This idea has also been developed by Hardt and Negri in Multitude
(‘Postmodern society is characterized by the dissolution of traditional social
bodies’ (190)). They also refer to Robert Putnam’s account of the decline of
civic and community organizations in the United States. ‘Bowling clubs,
religious organizations, and the like used to provide a basic means of social
aggregation, forming social groups and a cohesive society. The decline of
such civic and community groups is a symptom of the general decline of
all forms of social aggregation in the United States’, Putnam argues, ‘leaving
the population not only bowling alone but living alone in a wide variety of
ways’ (Putnam, 2000, 190).
2. Born and bred in Zanzibar, Tanzania, Gurnah moved to England in 1968, at
the age of twenty. After getting a degree in education, he started his career
as a schoolteacher in Kent, before leaving for Nigeria. Several years later, he
moved back to England where he still lives. Gurnah is an acclaimed novelist
and is the author of several novels, many of which deal with immigration,
displacement and identity, like his first three novels: Memory of Departure
(1987), Pilgrims Way (1988) and Dottie (1990). More recently he has written
Admiring Silence (1996) and By the Sea (2001).
3. The protagonist of Admiring Silence (1996) is an immigrant from Zanzibar
who came to England as a young man in order to escape political instability.
Several years later, after settling in and overcoming certain prejudices, he
undertakes a journey home without his wife and daughter.
4. This point will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter. For fur-
ther reference to code switching, see John Skinner, The Stepmother Tongue,
1998.
5. I am here implicitly referring to the six functions of language described by
Jakobson in Essais de Linguistique générale (1966): the referential, the emo-
tive, the poetic, the conative, the phatic and the metalinguistic functions
of language.
6. For discussion on this topic, see Chapter 4.
7. For further discussion of bilingualism and schizophrenia, see Deleuze,
Essays Critical and Clinical.
Notes 171
8. A difference needs to be made between integration in England and in the

rest of the UK. Sardar shows how the self-representation of regions where
people have the sense that they occupy a peripheral position and have suf-
fered from imperialism, makes integration paradoxically easier for British
Asians (Sardar, 2008, 72).
9. Smolicz has compared the case of Italian and Jewish communities in
Australia and has showed that the core values of the Italian community are
family, religion and language, while that of the Jewish community are reli-
gion, the cultural inheritance and a sense of their historical origins.
10. Zadie Smith’s novel chronicles the life of two families of immigrants from
Bangladesh. Archie belongs to the wave of immigration that came to
England after the Second World War, while Samad arrived in 1973 with
his young wife Alsana. The novel opens on the tragi–comic narrative of
Archie’s failed attempt at committing suicide by smoking himself to death
in his car on New Year’s Eve, partly because of a broken marriage. In the rest
of the novel, Archie knows better days and marries Clara, a girl of Jamaican
origin with whom he has a child Ivie. As for his friend Samad, he has twin
boys Majid and Millat who were born in England. The narration constantly
shifts perspective, from one family to another, but also from the perspective
of the parents to that of their children so that we get the impression of a
kaleidoscopic view on some of the issues of the British Asian community. Of
course, the scope of the novel is limited to one area, Cricklewood Broadway
and one class, immigrants who belong to the working class but who have
received some education, which also explains their frustration with the fact
that their value is not fully acknowledged in the host country.
11. Rushdie writes about the migrant that he generally suffers a triple disrup-
tion: ‘He loses his place, he enters into an alien language, and he finds him-
self surrounded by beings whose social behaviour and codes are very unlike,
and sometimes even offensive to, his own’ (Rushdie, 1991, 277–8).
12. Hardt and Negri’s conception of the multitude is also derived from Spinoza’s
conception of the conatus. They see in Spinoza ‘the one who most clearly
anticipates this monstrous nature of the multitude by conceiving of life as a
tapestry on which the singular passions weave a common capacity of trans-
formation’ (194).
13. Gerd Baumann points out that the question of rights can be situated on
several platforms, the civil rights platform, ethnic groups and religious
groups.
6 Language(s) and the Diasporic Subject

1. Studies like The Empire Writes Back have stressed the need for writers from
former colonies to seize the language of the centre and to replace it ‘in a dis-
course fully adapted to the colonized place’ by ‘remoulding the language to
new usages’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1989, 39).
2. Among the main arguments in favour of choosing the English language was
that it would be a lingua franca and would also help writers and their audi-
ences eschew the pitfall of nationalism since the use of another language
could help create a common imaginary of African postcolonial experience.
172 Notes
3. Okara’s position showed great foresight, in the sense that he was able to pre-
dict the emergence of an African English, which would have its place among
other forms of postcolonial Englishes such as Australian, New Zealand and
Canadian English (Okara, 1963; see Wa Thiong’o, 1997 [1981]).
4. This issue is still a bone of contention today. In Imaginary Homelands,
Salman Rushdie stresses the need to use English (‘to conquer English may
be to complete the process of making ourselves free’, (Rushdie, 1991, 17),
but this English ‘needs remaking for our own purposes’ (17)).
5. The phrase ‘stepmother tongue’ used as a title and key concept by John
Skinner aptly sums up the love/hate relationship that binds the inhabitant
of a formerly colonized country to the language of political domination.
6. It is a fact that languages are disappearing at the worryingly fast speed of
one language every fortnight. Specialists even calculate that by the end of
the twenty-first century, half of the 5000 existing languages will have dis-
appeared (Crystal, 2000; Nettle and Romaine, 2000). This phenomenon,
which is linked to the disappearance of cultures absorbed by others, goes
almost unnoticed, as if we took it for granted that this was a natural phe-
nomenon. The term ‘glottophagia’ coined by Calvet aptly describes the
phenomenon but seems to suggest that there is no way of stopping this
linguistic gluttony.
7. In India, the hierarchy elite/non-educated people linked to the use of spe-
cific languages was already in existence before the colonial era since a rela-
tively small number of people could master Sanskrit.
8. Nicholas Ostler remarks that by the late fourteenth century, French had
been dropped as a medium of education in England ‘as a needless barrier to
vernacular understanding’ (Ostler, 2005, 467).
9. In this chapter I shall use the terms ‘mother tongue’ and ‘father tongue’
to designate the language spoken at home, as opposed to the language
imported by colonization, a dichotomy which often corresponds to the lan-
guage of affect as opposed to the language of cognitive activity. However,
this dichotomy will be questioned later on in the chapter.
10. Some of her poems describe the tongue of the mother cleaning the child.
These very visual passages lay emphasis on the way language is a bodily
activity as well as a cognitive one since language is expressed through the
body; it is an extension of the body and bears witness to its physicality.
11. Monica Ali has recently published her second novel Alentejo Blue (2006).
12. As for Chanu he clearly reduces the English language to its instrumental
function: ‘You see, when the English went to our country, they did not go
to stay. They went to make money, and the money they made, they took it
out of the country. They never left home. Mentally. Just taking money out.
And this is what I am doing now’ (Ali, 2004 [2003] 174).
To him English remains the language of cultural domination and repre-
sents a form of cultural capital he aspires to.
13. The case of Gogol’s name is even more complex since his name is neither
American nor Indian but Russian. For further discussion of the name issue,
see Munoz, 2008.
14. Although bilingualism is often seen as something positive, which may even
help children develop meta-linguistic abilities, it has for many years been
thought to have negative consequences on the intellectual development
Notes 173
of children who were sometimes behind at school (Tsushima and Hogan,

1975). It was also thought to affect their psychological development and
lead to a sense of alienation and a loss of bearings caused by the fact that
the children could not cope with two systems of values and two sets of rep-
resentations (McClosky and Schaar, 1965; Diebold, 1968).
15. Born in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, at the end of the Second World
War, of Ukrainian parents, Marina Lewycka grew up in England where she
still lives.
16. Marina Lewycka further explores the theme of illegal immigration and the
plight of asylum seekers in her second novel Two Caravans (2007).
17. In Orwell’s 1984, a new language is invented so as to control people and
prevent them from rebelling against the regime. It is a simplified version
of traditional English; it has no synonyms and cannot be used to express
different shades of meaning. As for adjectives and verbs, they are meant to
disappear in the ultimate version of Newspeak so that it will become impos-
sible for people to express an opinion or refer to agency.
18. In Am I that Name? Language, Discourse, Society, Denise Riley insists on the
temporality of discourse and the shifting meaning of discursive categories
which vary with the contexts. She writes that ‘women’ is historically, dis-
cursively constructed, and always relatively to other categories which them-
selves change (Riley, 1988, 1–2).
19. In a recent article published in the Telegraph Review (18 August 2007) Toby
Clements observes that ‘unlike the French, who have sought to codify their
language with stiff rules governing the words you can use, English speakers
have been able to take their pick from wherever they liked’. It is indeed true
that an important aspect of the French’s fear of globalization originates in a
fear of cultural homogeneity.
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Index
Achebe, Chinua, 126, 149 Desai, Kiran, 39, 77, 86, 87, 91,
Ali, Monica, 39–44, 77, 79–84, 91, 111–13 passim
101, 115, 123, 133, 135, 146 diaspora
Anderson, Benedict, 94, 163 concept, 5, 11, 12, 16, 18, 38
Anzaldua, Gloria, 128, 143, 144 diaspora of despair, 163
Appadurai, Arjun, 1, 2, 12, 20, 26, 39, diaspora of hope, 2, 163
78, 88–90 passim, 99, 121, 123 diaspora of terror, 163
Appiah, Anthony, 9, 99, 100–2 diasporic imaginary, 11, 68, 69
Arendt, Hannah, 100, 101, 109, 110, 113 experience of diaspora, 37–44 passim,
Augé Marc, 8, 78, 92–4 127, 161, 163
authenticity, 7, 22, 27, 36, 41, Du Bois, W.E.B., 15
51–6 passim, 61, 63, 73, 79,
80, 82, 84 Eagleton, Terry, 20, 97, 100, 102
Eco, Umberto, 55
Bachelard, Gaston, 33 English language, 128–30 passim,
Badiou, Alain, 102 133–5, 144–54, 157
Bauman, Zygmunt, 3, 16, 78, 92, 95, Englishness, 51
96, 99, 100, 112, 113 ethnicity, 53, 55, 68, 70, 71
Bayart, Jean-François, 1, 99 Eugenides, Jeffrey, 38, 39
Bhabha, Homi K., 1, 6, 12, 18, 45, 46,
56, 57, 90 Fanon, Frantz, 59, 61
bilanguaging, 9, 125, 128, 136, Black Skin, White Masks, 51
143, 144 Farah, Nuruddin, 33, 34
bilingualism, 8, 9, 105–9, 126–8, father tongue, 131
133–8, 140–8, 159, 172, 173
Brah, Avtar, 13, 19 Garcia, Cristina, 135, 146–9
Burke, Edmund, 100, 101, 110 Geertz, Clifford, 25
Butler, Judith, 65 Gellner, Ernest, 53
Gilroy, Paul, 12, 13, 15, 50, 54
Chambers, Iain, 1, 51 Black Atlantic, 53, 60, 73
Chamoiseau, Patrick, 153 There Ain’t no Black in the Union
Clifford, James, 7, 53 Jack, 12
code switching, 136 Glissant, Edouard, 4, 10, 128, 150,
cosmopolitanism, 20, 100, 101, 102 151, 152, 153, 155, 158, 159
créolisation, 10, 50, 129, 152, 153 Goldie, Terry, 55, 139
Crystal, David, 4, 128, 172 Gottdiener, Mark, 79, 80, 86, 93
Gurnah, Abdulrazak, 77, 101
Deleuze, Gilles, 109, 131, 144, Admiring Silence, 103
145, 155
Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 73, Hagège, Claude, 4, 128
97, 110, 146, 158 Hall, Stuart, 12, 15, 43, 52, 60, 62
Derrida Jacques, 32, 60, 128, 131, 137, Hardt, Michael, 9, 102, 120, 121,
141–3 passim, 158 122, 124
187
188 Index
Harvey, David, 8, 77 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 29

Hassner, Pierre, 128 Mignolo, Walter, 136, 143, 150,
Hewinson, 79, 82 157, 158
Hobsbawm, Eric, 53, 100 miscegenation, 153
home, concept in diasporic Mishra, Sudesh, 17, 19
literature, 13, 34, 38, 40–2 Mishra, Vijay, 5, 17, 23
homecoming narratives, 41, 42, 77, mother tongue, 9, 105–8, 126–32,
84–7 138, 142, 147
hooks, bell, 50, 53 Mouffe, Chantal, 17
Huggan, Graham, 22, 79 Mudrooroo (Colin Johnson), 35, 36,
Hutcheon, Linda, 43, 152, 127 55, 56, 165, 166
hybridity, 27 Mukherjee, Bharati, 85
hybridization, 152, 129
naming, 35, 36, 139
identity, postcolonial, 20, 30, 31, nation, concept, 20, 53, 58, 94,
33–6, 59, 70 110, 130
diasporic, 3, 7, 15, 37, 51, 58, 64, 65 Negri, Antonio, 100
imaginary, 23, 24, 25 New Historicism, 15
imagined communities, 163 nomadism, 52
interstitiality, 6, 14, 15, 17, 18, 26, 31, nostalgia, 7, 11, 23, 75, 77–80, 82, 84
39, 42–9, 51, 69, 164 Nourbese Philip, Marlene, 131, 132
Islas, Antonio, 52
Okara, Gabriel, 126
Jen, Gish, 63–8 passim Orientalism, 81
Johnson, Colin, see Mudrooroo Orwell, George, 126
Ostler, Nicholas, 150
Kristeva, Julia, 140, 141
Kunzru, Hari, 39, 78, 85, 86, 93, 94, phenomenology, 29
110, 111, 115 Phillips, Caryl, 103, 104
Kureishi, Hanif, 30, 44, 51, 57, 58 polyglossia, 138, 143
postmodernism, 79–84 passim,
Lacan, Jacques, 23 92, 93
Laclau, Ernesto, 102, 120, 121 Pratt, Marie-Louise, 15, 162
Lahiri, Jhumpa, 39, 40, 135, 146 Punter, David, 88
The Namesake, 138, 139, 140, 141
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 4, 129, 136 race, 53, 65, 68, 70
Interpretation as Pragmatics, 153, 156 Radhakrishnan, Rajagopolan, 13, 16
A Marxist Philosophy of Language, Renault, Emmanuel, 8, 116
153, 154 Rhizome, 159
Lévi, André, 11, 16 Ricoeur, Paul, 26
Levy, Andrea, 41, 51, 58, 60, 61, 62 rights, 100, 101
Lewycka, Marina, 142, 143 Riley, Denise, 27–30, 155
Lowe, Lisa, 7, 53 Roth, Philip, 30, 102
luggage motif, 41, 42 The Human Stain, 46–9
Roy, Arundhati, 79
McLuhan, Marshall, 8, 77, 85, 86 Rushdie, Salman, 22, 37, 101, 102
magic realism, 37 Fury, 8, 105–9
Marangoly George, Rosemary, 21, 35, 41 Imaginary Homelands, 23, 75, 76, 82
Memmi, Albert, 33 The Satanic Verses
Index 189
Said, Edward, 43, 81 transnationalism, 9, 18–20, 99, 100,

Sam, Agnes, 21 102, 110, 125, 130
Saro-Wiva, Ken, 125
Selvon, Sam, 41 Vassanji, Moyez, 41, 68–73
Serres, Michel, 152 virtual communities, 78, 88–100
Skinner, John, 9
Smith, Zadie, 101, 116–19 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 87
Spivak, Gayatri, 13 Wa Thiong’o Ngugi, 32, 33, 36, 125,
stepmother tongue, concept, 9, 127, 126, 128, 136, 148, 149
150, 172 Decolonising the Mind, 36, 126, 127
Suleiri, Sara, 55
Young, Robert, 27, 153, 166
Tambiah, Stanley, 19
Tölölyan, Khachig, 12 Žižek, Slavoj, 23

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Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone

RE-PRESENTING OTHERNESS: Mapping the Colonial ‘Self’/Mapping the

1. Paradigmatic Shifts and New Orientations in

2. Identity, Interstitiality and Diaspora 26

3. Interstitiality, Authenticity, Postmodernity 50

4. Shaky Ground, New Territorialities and

5. Disjunction, Ethics and the Diasporic Subject 99

Deterritorialization and the sheer ‘nakedness of

6. Language(s) and the Diasporic Subject 125

I would like to thank the editors of the numerous journals in which

The chronicles of diasporas – those of the black Atlantic, of the

Le monde moderne est hanté par le spectre d’un effacement

This reflection on identity takes place at a time when identity continues

agenda and impacts on notions such as communities, nations, and the

of new types of communities. The interest of an anthropologist like Marc

The double focus of this study has led me to adopt a selective

sometimes of drawing too much on a corpus of texts from an inter-

Chapter 3 positions itself in contemporary debates and discusses the

harsher reality of economic stagnation, immigrants occupy a perfect

This reflection on identity in diasporic literature takes place at a time of

The tone and meaning of ‘diaspora’ are also transformed. According

The concept of the diaspora [can] be applied to expatriate minority

There is much merit in Gilroy’s or Bhabha’s resistance to the bipolar

That liminality should be associated with a certain critical vibrancy and

The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as

constituted through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. Cultural

The multi-situatedness of diaspora implies a duplication of patterns

While the sedentary man, rooted in a given culture, is necessarily deter-

For Sudesh Mishra there is always a risk of reverting to ‘identity as essence’

The (a)politicalness of liminality

Discussing the politicalness or a-politicalness of liminality necessitates

The discourse of radical democracy is no longer the discourse of

In fact, if we are to judge by recent developments in the field of

organization of diversity’ for a ‘replication of uniformity.’

Another difficulty lies in the multi-directionality of migratory fluxes

A multi-axial performative conception of power highlights the ways

What is really at stake in Mishra’s critique of Avtar Brah’s analysis (at

and transnational communities as I argue in Chapter 4 in relation to

Aesthetics and the politics of liminality

Advocating the importance of a politics of liminality requires that one

dealing with postcolonial texts, for it implies a conception of art for

The original draft was impressionistic, its form suggestive of a

Another aspect of this ghettoization of the postcolonial text is the-

forcing writers to conform in order to fit into the mould. In a recent

The diasporic imaginary

An important feature of the diasporic novel, and one which I have

and hard to grasp frontier between identity and self-representation and

of social facts as if they were things, when it comes to identity-related

There is a sense in which the current interest in questions of identity

complex patterns of reconfiguration of human geography. If there is a

The need for organic metaphors of identity or society implies a coun-

In the same book, Young traces the historical development of notions

Whether merged or fused, the English did not transform themselves

identity. In fact, it became increasingly common in the later nine-

The critical reassessment of the workings of identity formation in

identity, as the legitimate object of a quest undertaken by the individ-

The impermanence of collective identities in general is a pressing

Riley’s analysis of the complex dynamics of identity definition and the

This passage points to the redefinition of the contours of the American

Identity and interstitiality: postcolonial perspectives