Between Departure and Belonging: The Representation of Migration and Diaspora in Modern Novels

Abstract

The closing decades of the twentieth century and the opening decades of the twenty-first have witnessed the emergence of migration and diaspora as among the most consequential subjects of the modern novel, a development that runs parallel to, and is inseparable from, the accelerated global movements of people occasioned by decolonisation, economic globalisation, and, more recently, conflict-driven displacement. This paper examines how a selection of major diasporic novels -- Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, and Mohsin Hamid's Exit West -- narrate the experience of leaving, arriving, and remaining suspended between cultural worlds. Drawing on the theoretical vocabulary of diaspora studies developed by Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, James Clifford, and Avtar Brah, and employing a qualitative methodology of comparative close reading, the paper identifies four recurring representational strategies across the novels under study: the fracturing of linear narrative time to register the psychological rupture of displacement; the use of food, language, and domestic space as sites of cultural negotiation; the figuration of the second generation as inhabitants of a hybrid, "in-between" cultural position; and the increasingly abstract, allegorical treatment of border-crossing in the most recent fiction of forced migration. The paper argues that the modern diasporic novel has progressively moved from a mode primarily concerned with nostalgic recovery of an original homeland toward one that treats hybridity and multiple belonging as a generative, if often painful, condition in its own right, and that this shift itself constitutes a significant contribution of diasporic fiction to the broader development of the novel form.