Noemí Pereira-Ares

University of Santiago de Compostela | USC · Department of English and German

"Introduction Postcolonial Youth in Contemporary British Fiction" in Open Access at: https://brill.com/view/book/9789004464261/BP000001.xml

Committed to the exploration of the female experience—specifically the South Asian female experience—Meera Syal has often woven a feminist subtext into the fabric of her works. This is probably nowhere more evident than in “The Traveller” (1988), an allegorical short story that constitutes Syal’s more sustained effort to produce a feminist text per...

Departing from recent theorisations on liminality in the short story genre and drawing on diaspora theory as well as socio-cultural approaches to dress, this chapter provides a sartorial reading of Qaisra Shahraz’s twenty-first-century version of her story “A Pair of Jeans” (2017). As the chapter contends, Shahraz’s story signals a point of incepti...

The present contribution intends to study the subversive implications of the narratological technique of focalization in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane. Relying on postcolonial and gender studies, I argue that, in Brick Lane, Ali uses focalization to subvert the prevailing centrality of both the white western gaze –the “imperial gaze” as defined by Kaplan...

The historical dynamics that have brought British and South Asian people into contact span more than 400 years and, contrary to what is commonly assumed, Britain became a ‘contact zone’ (Pratt in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Routledge, New York, 1992) almost at the same time as the Indian subcontinent itself.

The new millennium has been a ‘post-period’ almost since its dawn. Often referred to as the post-9/11 era, it is now marked by other related ‘posts’—from the 3/11 Madrid (2004) and 7/7 London (2005) bombings to more recent events in England, Germany, France and elsewhere across the globe.

As the travelogues analysed in Chap. 2 demonstrate, the South Asian presence in Britain is not to be circumscribed to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries alone. However, most South Asians in present-day Britain are connected to the history of South Asian mass displacement that took place in the period following the Second World War.

Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddhaof Suburbia ([1990] 2009) is set in London during the 1970s.

The 1990s that frame Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha HaHee Hee ([1999] 2000) can be regarded as a period of multicultural celebration, far from the colour bar and institutionalised racism of previous decades and unaware of the tensions thatSeptember 11 was to bring about in the years to come.

This book is the first book-length study to explore the sartorial politics of identity in the literature of the South Asian diaspora in Britain. Using fashion and dress as the main focus of analysis, and linking them with a myriad of identity concerns, the book takes the reader on a journey from the eighteenth century to the new millennium, from ea...

The 9/11 terrorist attacks, in their unexpectedness and cruelty, have turned into an unassimilated traumatic episode in the history of the Western world. From a literary perspective, many of the fictions that deal with 9/11 and its aftermath can be said to represent conspicuous attempts to come to terms with the trauma derived from 9/11. Drawing on...

Since the mid-20th century, literature in English has witnessed the appearance of a plethora of narratives that map the new territorialities of the Indian diaspora in places such as Britain, America, Canada, Australia or the Caribbean. Cauvery Madhavans Paddy Indian portrays an Indo-Irish cultural encounter on Irish soil, thus offering a pioneering...

The fictions of the South Asian diaspora in Britain have recurrently dramatized many of the sartorial confrontations, negotiations, and creative exchanges resulting from the interaction between Britons and South Asians on British soil. Some of them have also looked back to “clothing matters” (Tarlo, 1996) in colonial India, thus establishing a dial...

In Brick Lane, Monica Ali problematizes the practice of hijab both implicitly and explicitly. To this end, the British Bangladeshi writer does not simply open the discussion within the fictional world of the novel. She also creates a series of characters whose dressed bodies silently project a broad spectrum of attitudes towards hijab, attitudes th...