ABSTRACT
This chapter is part of a tentative project on how contemporary discourses of identity impact on our understanding and teaching of texts to do with migration and multiculturalism. One of the issues I am interested in is a way of talking and thinking about the problem of identification across cultural boundaries, and beyond the exclusions of ‘ethnic absolutism’, where cultures are seen to be hermetically sealed within themselves. The recent theorisations of identity as textual, hybrid, performative, strategic and positional offer a way of addressing these difficulties. Questions I am concerned with at present are to do with how border crossings are negotiated in the formation of political identities and political affiliations. Questions such as: How can we represent border crossings in a way that does not simply restate the old liberal trick of tolerance as celebration? This is to avoid the attitude: ‘it’s OK but not in my back yard’. How do we represent difference in ways that do not simply reinstate more of the ‘ethnocentric’ same? How do we ‘perform’ political identities given our diverse locations and experiences? How do we begin to connect our experience of lived identity, to what exceeds consciousness as subjectivity? In its more practical incarnations, such a project is linked to my experience of teaching contemporary literature under the sign of ‘Asian’, ‘Black British’ or postcolonial, and to a sense that politically progressive labels do not always coincide with the name my students give to their experiences. The problem that haunts some of my more interesting teaching sessions is what is at stake in these identifications – what kinds of futures can one engender and participate in when inhabiting these terms. In particular, we have been concerned with how to move the question of cultural crossings away from the pathology of cultural clash to narratives of ‘transformations’. We can understand ‘trans-formative’ in the dual sense of the word, in terms of bridging thinking across structures and formations, and in terms of depicting a process of change and development in which identities are acknowledged as diasporic, multiple and heterogeneous. My aim in this chapter is modest: I will explore two writers’ representations of the crossing of cultural, gender and class boundaries and consider what we can learn from them. The texts to be considered are: V.S. Naipaul’s novel-cum-autobiography, The Enigma of Arrival (1987), and Farhana Sheikh’s The Red Box (1991).
