Home as Postcolonial Trope in the Fiction of V.S. Naipaul

Abstract

Summary JanMohamed (1992), in his work on the postcolonial literature of migrants, argues that their “positionality [as] specular border intellectuals” is not merely the combination of initial dislocation, together with a Western education that rules out the possibility of “gregarious acceptance” of any new home culture, but that “homelessness cannot be achieved without multiple border crossings or without a constant, keen awareness of the politics of borders” (1992: 112). Through their migration as specular border intellectuals, a new form of community becomes possible, a community of individuals Bhabha terms the “unhomely”; a new internationalism, a gathering of people in the Diaspora: “To live in the unhomely world, to find its ambivalences and ambiguities enacted in the house of fiction, or its sundering and splitting performed in the work of art, is also to affirm a profound desire for social solidarity” (1992: 18). This article offers an analysis of the house (of fiction) and home as a postcolonial trope characteristically problematised by Naipaul, who shows that while offering some intellectual and cultural possibilities, finds that these are nevertheless endangered and delimited by the possibilities afforded in a globalised world.