Fast and Slow Becomings in the Migrant’s Vision in V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival

Abstract

Sir Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul notoriously stands out as politically deviant from his fellow post-colonial writers and accusations against him often run high, labelling him as an essentialist, a reactionary, a lackey of neo-colonialism and a mimic of white supremacy. George Lamming, Edward Said, Derek Walcott, to mention but a few, have accused him of seeing the world from a Eurocentric and orientalist perspective, repeating the dichotomy of European order and rationality versus the disorder and irrationality of the non-European other. Lamming has accused him of ‘striving like mad to prove himself through promotion to the peaks of a “superior” culture’ (Lamming, 1960, 225). Said has referred to him as ‘a kind of belated Kipling [who] carries with him a kind of half-stated but finally unexamined reverence for the colonial order’, and, according to Pallavi Rastogi, Naipaul is more ‘stiff upper lip’ than the English. To Tabish Khair, he looks at ‘postcolonial hybridity and confusion’ with regret and does not recognise it as a ‘creative, constructive effort’ (Said, 1981, 115; Rastogi, 2002, 270–1, 278; Khair, 2001, 255).KeywordsOrganic HybridityMigration LiteratureEnglish CultureEternal ReturnEnglish IdentityThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.