Kamila Ryszkiel

KAOJ, 4 rok
Teksty Akademickie

Being mixed race in Britain – the identity crisis of second-generation immigrants in

Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album

The aim of this paper is to analyse the problem of identity crisis of second-generation
immigrants in The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album written by Hanif Kureishi, who
as a postcolonial writer and a second-generation immigrant provides an interesting insight
into dilemmas, problems and struggles of mixed-race people.
The paper seeks to show what evokes the identity crisis and how it influences
second-generation immigrants’ life in Britain. Also, it will be described how the main
characters deal with the identity crisis and why they do not accept their dual heritage. This
study is to investigate the problem of ‘dual personality’ caused by the assumed necessity of
choosing between adapting to new life in Britain and maintenance of tradition, ethnicity and
religion.
The first chapter will describe what the identity crisis is from sociological and cultural
point of view. The main body of the paper depicts the main characters’ search for their own
identity and their contemplation on what it means to be Indian/Pakistani/Muslim and British,
Also, it shows the characters’ struggle to discover where they belong. The latter part of the
paper will answer the questions why second-generation immigrants experience the identity
crisis and whether they feel forced to choose one identity or it is possible for them to accept
their dual heritage.

In order to conduct this research, I carefully examined and evaluated the problem of
identity crisis in the selected novels. I chose to examine the main protagonists only i.e. Karim
and Shahid. What is more, I searched for similarities and differences in the depiction of
characters and their identities, because The Buddha of Suburbia describes the problem of race
and racial identity and The Black Album provides the description of Muslims’ religious
identity. These two novels mark the change in valuing one’s own identity. Before the Rushdie
Affair, that began after publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988, postcolonial writers had
depicted characters as Pakistani, Indians, Arabs, Africans, rarely Muslims, so that the racial
identity was primary. After the publication, immigrants from largest Muslim-majority
countries started to identify themselves mostly as Muslims, hence their religious identity
became more essential. Therefore, I conducted analysis of differences and similarities
between racial and religious identity. Furthermore, I examined the influence of confrontation
with a new society, host culture and Western values on identity crisis in order to discover why
immigrants experience such a problem, thus I was able to determine what evokes immigrants
disorientation. Descriptions of protagonists’ interactions with British society and their social
status were of great importance as they helped to determine whether they influence the degree
of protagonists’ integration.