Hanif Kureishi:
Pakistani-British Identities
Please read both the autobiographical essay 'The Rainbow Sign' (1986) and the short story 'My Son the Fanatic' (1994) before the session.
Discussion questions:
- How
would you characterize Kureishi’s
narrative style and technique in ‘My Son the Fanatic’? How do they shape your
sympathies for each of the characters and our sense of their interactions
with one another?
-
“Parvez
had been telling Bettina that he thought people in the West sometimes felt
inwardly empty and that people needed a philosophy to live by” (p. 106). Is
this true, and is it perhaps one factor behind the radicalization observable
within certain ethnic minority (sub-)cultures in recent decades?
Can this
story
be said to have a ‘moral’.
And if so, then what is it?
-
In
his 1986 essay, ‘The Rainbow Sign’, what difficulties does Kureishi
identify in the ability of a ‘second-generation’ Pakistani Briton to negotiate
an identity between British and Pakistani cultures? In what ways
can both the story and the essay be read as arguments ‘for’ transculturality?
