Cultural Hybridity and Fluid Masculinities in the Postcolonial Metropolis: Individualized Gender Identities in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album

Abstract

Hanif Kureishi’s current critical standing as one of the leading representatives of ‘Black British,’ ‘Asian British,’ or ‘Postcolonial British’ writing in the contemporary literary scene in Great Britain is largely built upon the wide appeal and popular success of his first two novels, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and The Black Album (1995). Written in a realistic vein and set against the minutely captured background of ordinary life experiences in the multicultural London of the 1970s and 1980s, his narrative fictions focus on the life stories of first- and second-generation immigrants from the Indian subcontinent, using the two main protagonists, Karim Amir and Shahid Hasan, both born and raised near London, as narrative focalizers. Their stories are presented either in the form of a fictional autobiography, with Karim as narrator-protagonist, or through an impersonal third-person narration, with Shahid as a focalized consciousness.