Intersecting identities and violence in multicultural spaces of Tabish Khair’s fictional world

Abstract

Although Tabish Khair is categorised as a postcolonial author and diasporic Indian Muslim writer based in Denmark, his literary corpus and reflection on different social media platforms defy such categories (Dwivedi, 2013). Khair’s fiction does not fit into the fixed genre of writing, making him a writer in a noman’s land. His writing style traverses between literary and popular culture in postcolonial fiction, creating a canon of ‘Popular postcolonial fiction.’ This thesis focused on Tabish Khair’s fiction critically interrogates the intricacies of intersecting identities within multicultural contexts, foregrounding themes of identity conflicts, systemic violence, and the emergence of new xenophobia. This study examines how Khair’s narratives engage with identity conflicts— new xenophobia, narrativisation of identities in terms of glorification, thingification, and symbolic narrativisation, home and belongingness— exposing the systemic violence inherent in societies shaped by globalisation and postcolonial legacies. Employing critical frameworks of postcolonial and postmodern narrative strategies, the thesis explores Khair’s nuanced representation of systemic racism, migration, identity, subalternity, power and poverty as forces perpetuating the “othering” of marginalised groups and fuelling xenophobic tendencies. Khair writes about small towns without reducing them to any inertia and stasis.