Decentralising Postcolonial Readings of South Asian British Novels

Abstract

This thesis looks at how South Asian British novels and their modes of reception, both in and outside academia, reveal the complexities of a category of literary consumers called ‘postcolonial readers’, that is, readers of postcolonial texts who may not be able to make their voices heard in metropolitan academia. Inspired by the burgeoning turn to reception studies within the field of postcolonial literary studies, it enquires into ways in which the ‘absent’ readers of the debut novels of Hanif Kureishi, Meera Syal, Hari Kunzru and Monica Ali nuance assumptions about the white metropolitan readership of postcolonial literature held by both materialist and poststructuralist critics in the field. As an academic from such a peripheral site of reception as Thailand, I consider an attention to nonmetropolitan readers as a necessary step towards a decentralised interpretive framework of postcolonial criticism, institutionalised at the metropolitan literary centres and circulated globally through the English departments in universities around the world. Nonetheless, rather than dismissing altogether the properties within a postcolonial text to focus solely on the responses of its actual readers, I argue that the form and content of these texts resonate with readers from different social and cultural positions in different ways, and thus offer possibilities for the peripheral readers, not yet recognised in the existing modes of scholarly reading, to be imagined. As will be revealed in the first four chapters, shifting the focus from the worldview of each novel’s protagonist to the totality of the world in which s/he lives could render visible the system of unequal relations that readers from a variety of backgrounds could actively engage with. The penultimate chapter provides an account of the actual reading of Kureishi’s novel in a specific classroom context in Thailand to exemplify the influence that the reading framework at the centres has on the peripheral readers, and suggests a contextualised pedagogical model concerning the reading of the four novels under study as an alternative to it.

Date of Award	1 May 2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	King's College London
Supervisor	Anna Bernard (Supervisor)