Abstract

Home, in the present cultural configuration of the world, carries multiple shades of
meaning which can no longer be reduced to its conventional conceptualisation of fixity,
security and boundedness. The postmodern notion of home moves beyond its material
counterparts and embraces a dialectics of fluidity and movement, seeking to evolve a
constructed location of home in its plurilocal, multidimensional manifestations. When the
‘homing desire’ of the individual is allied with a deep feeling of loss and sadness, and the
idea of home is entangled with a sense of irrevocable displacement, home ceases to be a place
anymore, and becomes an emotion. Home, in this sense, transcends the physical limits of
fixed boundaries, and nationalities and is metamorphosed into a non-spatial entity, spawned
by the silenced memories and unspeakable desires of the past. The narrative of dislocation, in
fact, replicates multiple homes in the diasporic imagination of the immigrants which makes
the boundary between home and away a permeable and porous one, for one’s home is not
situated outside one’s self but becomes an indispensible part of it.

This model of diaspora connotes a condition rather than being definitive of a

community. This condition not only displays a strong proclivity towards multiple journeys
and localizations but also exhibits a subversive impulse of disrupting the boundaries of the
binaries. It perpetuates a differential redefinition of cultural accommodation and syncretism
filtering out the pitfalls of essentialism and stereotypical reductionism.

Cultural memory, in this narrative of reclamation, plays a pivotal role in reconfiguring

the identities of the individuals, retrospectively rendered through the fragile fragments of a
dynamicised memorialisation, bringing about a symbiotic confluence of the time past and the
time present which helps evolve a reconfigurated version of identity in the discourse of home
and belonging.

Cultural theorists such as Bhabha, Hall, Gilroy and others seek to evolve a mutable
conceptualization of identity that is keen to disrupt the narrative of a dominant culture,
introducing a fluid hybridization of the discourses of cultural purity and rootedness, to
creatively reconfigure the poetics of dominance and resistance in the framework of
transactive cultural encounters.

England, in this densely diasporising world, connotes a diverse and cosmopolitan

nation in which diasporic themes and experiences turn out to be the most informing element
to an understanding of the contemporary English literature. It has been the ‘home’ of many
diasporic authors and individuals whose narrative voices are vital in moulding the British
cultural space and identity, adding to its complexity and negotiative rhetoric of
diasporisation. Authors such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Hanif Kureishi, Romesh Gunesekera, and
others form a rich galaxy of diasporic writers in the literary scenario of Britain, migrating
from the various parts of the world. These writers, albeit nourish a connection with their
respective homelands, feel themselves utterly at home in England, searching and forging new
modes of belonging to be identified with.

In their fictional manoeuvres these writers seem to suggest that feeling at home is
essentially a subjective and culturally determined link to the imaginary, and that the memory
of home is recreative of the inner poetry of the private self which is evoked by emotion and
not by factual recollections. Identity, in the framework of the novels, in this dissertation,
becomes an unsettled entity marked out by the discontinuities of time and space, whereby,
through the ambiguity of displacement, the diasporans are able to reconstruct the inner
landscapes of their minds to perpetrate their sense of belonging, disrupting the idea of
bounded rootedness and homogenized belonging.

The rhetoric of diaspora then involves forging new narratives of belonging which seek
to accommodate the migrant’s position more appropriately than the older totalizing or holistic
model of representations. The diasporic subjects do not have to secure their ‘roots’ in a fixed
place, a nation or an ethnic group, rather they must ceaselessly devise for themselves itinerant
cultural ‘routes’ which take them emotionally to multiple places and into contact with
different groups of the populace, establishing new connections between past, present and
future without presuming a linear, continuous movement through time and space.

The present dissertation, thus, is an exhaustive attempt to cartograph and recapture the
diverse dimensions of ‘home’ in the contemporary glocalized world in general and England
as a specifically diasporic point, in which these writers are extraordinarily attentive to the
reconfigurement of their cultural identities through the fragile fluidity of an ever vibrant
memory, in the narrative of the sequestered self, in an alien ambience of apparent cultural
fragmentation and dispersion.

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