Hybrid Identities East-West Binaries: A Reorientalist Overview Of The Buddha Of Suburbia By Hanif Kureishi

Abstract

This paper investigates how the intricate negotiation of hybrid identities and the defamiliarization of East-West binaries is reflected in Hanif Kureishi's important novel The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). This exploration focuses on the cultural representation of identity through an orientalist lens, as evidenced by the multi-dimensional characters of Kureishi that do not fit into colonial binaries in their depiction of the characters regardless of their colonial underpinnings. The travel route of the central character, Karim Amir, between a suburban London town to the thickest of theatre life in the city carries with it the ideas of cultural hybridity, the postcolonial girding of identity, and the opposition of the Western transcendent stereotypes regarding the eastern spirituality and identity. The storytelling technique used by Kureishi also fractures our traditional understanding of authenticity and belonging, placing his characters as inhabitants of a border zone that does not want to grant them the relief of definite cultural belonging. The suburbs thus depicted in the novel form a battleground on which boundaries such as race, class, sexuality, and nation are crossed and broken, proving new approaches to self-definition. By exposing us to how Karim interacted with different groups of people, the father with his ad hoc meditation meetings, and the avant-garde theatre people in London, the text exposes the performative practice of cultural identity as it is being vitally practiced by the current band that takes the stage. At the same time, the text critiques the mode of commodification of Eastern spirituality enacted in a Western cultural setting. Such analysis indicates the way Kureishi uses irony, satire, and narrative complexity to challenge not only the Western Orientalist presumptions but also the Eastern simplifying views, concluding that multicultural identity in modern Britain should be described using a deeper and more diverse perspective. The article adds to postcolonial literature criticism because it shows how even the hybrid text can deconstruct and reconstruct the meaning of culture at the same time.

Keywords: Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia, hybrid identity, Orientalism, postcolonialism, cultural identity, East-West binaries