Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain

The figure of the diasporic or migrant writer has recently come to be seen in the West as the ‘Everyman‘ of the late modern period, a cultural traveller who can traverse national, political and ethnic boundaries. Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain seeks not only to place individual works of now world famous writers such as VS Naipaul, Salman Rushdie,Selvon or Hanif Kureishi within a diverse tradition of im/migrant writing that has evolved in Britain since the Second World War, but also locates their work within an historical, cultural and aesthetic framework which has its roots prior to postwar migrations and derives from long-established indigenous traditions at ‘home‘ and ‘abroad‘. Nasta also examines the work of lesser known writers, including Attia Hosain, GV Desani, Aubrey Menen and Romesh Gunesekera. Close critical readings combine with an historical and theoretical overview in this first book to chart the crucial role played by writers of South Asian origin in the belated acceptance of a literary poetics of black and Asian writing in Britain today.