ABSTRACT
The global movements of people over the last century have highlighted as never before the questions we all ask ourselves at some point: ‘Who am I?’ ‘Where do I come from?’ With the result that, as Stuart Hall remarks at the beginning of a wide-ranging collection of essays exploring Questions of Cultural Identity, ‘There has been a veritable discursive explosion in recent years around the concept of “identity”, at the same moment as it has been subjected to a searching critique’. As he points out, various disciplinary areas have been engaged in an ‘anti-essentialist critique of ethnic, racial and national conceptions of cultural identity and the “politics of location” to the extent that the question arises, ‘What, then, is the need for further debate about “identity”? Who needs it?’ 4
My immediate answer is, we do-and if, for now, I take ‘we’ to denote those of us interested in postcolonial writings, this chapter is an attempt to frame an affi rmative answer, drawing in particular on V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987), while referring to some of his other work. Inhabiting the uncertain territory between fi ction and autobiography, Enigma is Naipaul’s most compelling yet fi nally ambiguous attempt to defi ne who he is, and where he comes from. Mingling nostalgia and critique, Enigma seeks to engage with both his present and his past, exploring his new home on an English estate and the multiple journeys that have brought
him there. It offers a continuing challenge to easy assumptions about the formation of identity for the postcolonial subject, including all those (and they are many) who have taken Naipaul to be on the side of the colonisers.5 It also suggests how and why memory, including nostalgia, is central to such formation.
