Imbalance hybridization of cultures and hollowness of mimic man in the lonely londoners and a house for Mr. Biswas: a diasporic reading

Abstract

The postcolonial Indian diasporic literature as one of the most discussed topics in world literature demonstrates the nostalgia of diaspora for their distant homelands and their quest to retain their racial and ethnic identity in a hybridized world. As postcolonial migrant intellectuals, Selvon and Naipaul deal with postcolonial displacement and homelessness resulting from diverse diasporic movements. Rootlessness displacement, and searching for the roots and ‘home’ and the transformation of the identities are an integral part of diasporic study of The Lonely Londoners and A House for Mr. Biswas. Selvon and Naipaul in their fictional works are renewing a kind of novel in those cultures where their search for a sense of identity and the need to establish a past on which the present can properly stand has a special force. The study examines how westernization, acculturation and a continuous process of hybridization lead to crisis of identity in the selected novels. The selected authors depict the disintegration of the society of Indian immigrants in Trinidad under the influence of borrowed culture, of mimicry and hybridity.