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Title Maintaining Multiple Identities: A Sociolinguistic Analysis of South Asian Immigrant Fiction

Author(s) Muhammad Usman Ghani

Abstract South Asian immigrants on being in a foreign land, including Britain and the USA, have to make many adjustments in their lifestyles to live a less frictional and more resourceful life. Yet they cannot completely delink themselves from their original culture in which they or their parents are brought up. This results in their developing complex and multiple identities which draw force partially from their origin as well as their host culture. Fiction writings, particularly by Diaspora writers, bring out these conflicts/issues more clearly than any other means as authors masquerade behind the veils of their respective protagonists whom they give their languages, origins, ethnicities, biographical similarities, particularly identity dilemmas and crises. This study aims to investigate how immigrants of various South Asian origins and generations develop, maintain and/or negotiate the multiple aspects of their identities when they live in an entirely different host culture. With this aim in mind, the lives of characters in selected works of South Asian Immigrant Fiction have been analyzed using Bakhtin's framework of Novelistic Discourse for detecting the identity issues confronted by the immigrants as it particularly focuses on the dialogical relationship between the author and his/her characters, their languages and worldviews in the novelistic discourse. The works chosen centre around the issues of maintenance and negotiation of identities of various characters in the South Asian Immigrant Fiction in English. The ideology and identity of the authors is traced through their language use and portrayal of characters. Bakhtin's framework is aided by Sociolinguistic tools as well as Literary Close Reading, Discourse Analysis and Social Anthropology. The study reveals that the necessity of developing multiple, contradictory and compromised identities are not without their windfalls and pitfalls though; it is helpful in immigrants' assimilation and naturalization in the host culture, yet at the cost of losing a great part of their original culture, language and heritage. Grown up in their native countries, the first generation parents are able to maintain multiple identities pretty successfully by posing a 'fake' identity. In contrast, the subsequent generations (in their developmental stages) have to face many peculiar dilemmas which often result in distancing/breaking off from their parents. The biggest challenge that poses the latter is striking a balance between individualism and family unity, personal freedom and family life, adjustment in the mainstream and expectations of home and, liberty and social conservatism.

Type Thesis/Dissertation PhD

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Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2013-01-01

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