Lindsey Moore  (Lancaster University, UK)
Literature in a Time of 'Terror':
Trans-Positional Representation in Contemporary British-Asian Fiction

This paper will focus on literature which represents British-Asian, specifically British-Muslim, identities in relation to post-9/11 and post-7/7 debates about national identity and security, cultural and religious self-expression and the future of multiculturalism. Contemporary literary work solicits a new vocabulary for categorising and comprehending cultural difference whilst affirming a complex politics of location. In relation to first and second-generation writers, the postcolonial paradigm provided a rich site for conceptualising the negotiation of racism, colonialism and its after-effects. However, very recent fiction emerges from and reflects upon an altered (if historically-related) set of coordinates in which cosmopolitanism, secularism and hybridisation are challenged by the politics of faith and insurgency defined and contested both within communities and transnationally.

Monica Ali's Brick Lane (2003) and Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) engage with the issue of representation within British-Asian communities by encouraging empathy, albeit ambivalently, with female perspectives normally rendered subaltern by their belief system, class, generation and/or gender. Authorial strategies include a manipulation of narrative perspective and the presentation of women in a fraught relationship to economies of affect, speech and silence. These economies reflect metonymically upon the transmission and reception of culturally-specific subject matter in the wider public domain. Such texts call for new terms which would productively challenge both traditional definitions of 'Britishness' and, more recently, 'new ethnicities', 'Black Britishness' and a benign 'multiculturalism'. Ziauddin Sardar's concepts of 'mutually assured diversity' and 'transmodernism', and Homi Bhabha's most recent work on the local/global interface, lead me to propose the category of transpositionality. As such, creative work translates between subjects within British-Asian communities, between these communities and the wider polis, and between national and supra-national affirmations of alienation and belonging.

The paper will close with comparative and necessarily more speculative observations about the representation of minority discursive positions in British-Asian and Franco-Maghrebian ('Beur') literatures published in the last twenty years. My proposition is that differing socio-economic contexts and ideological/political frameworks, the latter which may be defined as 'multicultural' (Britain) versus 'integrative' (France), have encouraged distinct thematic and aesthetic tendencies. However, a politics of 'terror' which problematically represents Muslim individuals and communities is of transnational provenance. The concept of transpositionality will thus be assessed in relation to a selection of 'Beur' literary examples in order to test its usefulness as a category descriptive of work which exists in more than one national context and at the same time confronts new historical determinants.