Gender identity in British postcolonial novel: Hanif Kureishi's "The Buddha of Suburbia"

Abstract

© Medwell Journals, 2015. The study deals with problems of gender identity and their reflection in one of the most popular and prominent trends of contemporary British fiction-postcolonial literature. In general, the gender problematic has become one of current interest at the turn of the 20th-21st centuries. It is among the most topical questions not only for social and psychologist studies but also for literature ones. As a part of world culture and art, literature has been always inseparably bound with all of the processes and phenomena taking place in the society. That's why, the way how postcolonialism and gender issues interact within the confines of modern British literature can be rather versatile field for the research. So that the debut novel of one of the most famous representatives of the English authors with non-British roots. "The Buddha of Suburbia" by half-English half-Pakistanian Hanif Kureishi-becomes a very interesting example of gender, cultural and national discourses' combination that in its own turn reveals the hybrid, heterogeneous and pluralistic character of multicultural prose.