Criticism of Identity Fetishism in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia

Abstract

This paper seeks to unravel how Hanif Kureishi’s novel, The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), reflects issues related to immigration after the upheavals of the 1960s and the wave of independence in what were once the colonized lands and territories of the British Empire. The article shows how the novel succeeds in raising the thorny questions of identity and imagined native homelands as they are well-known today. The latter questions also result in scenes of identity fetishism and strict-mindedness that the novel openly challenges. Through the use of satire, Kureishi exposes the dangers of exclusive identity and strict clinging to one’s homeland and heritage in a globalized, metropolitan space of London. The novel is also critical of the legacies of Orientalism, an ideology and a prism that views ‘Others’ as backward, uncivilsed and threat to a deemed pure identity. The article also stresses that questions of immigration and immigrants will remain an enduring concern for coming decades in metropolitan spaces and contexts. This attests to the fact that novels are not simply works of pure imagination without any reflection of actual problems and phenomena.