Belonging and Unbelonging: Postcolonial Identity Crises in South Asian Faction

The thesis discusses the portrayal of postcolonial identity through an ongoing and inconclusive tussle in the chosen works by Mohsin Hamid and Hanif Kureishi. Through the postcolonial theoretical constructs of Orientalism, hybridity, and the third space, this thesis examines the ways in which characters move in and out of the precarious area of belonging and unbelonging.This study examines the ways in which Hamid, through his novels The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West, develops identity as a consequence of global mobility and the destabilization of geopolitics, in which first-generation migrants encounter external alienation and systemic racism within a post-9/11 environment. Contrarily, the discussion of the plays Borderline and Birds of Passage, and the novel The Black Album by Kureishi, changes the emphasis to the internal ideological contradictions of the second-generation Pakistanis living in Britain in their attempt to reconcile the tension between liberal values in the West and inherited cultural heritage. This thesis is presented through a comparative analysis, asserting that whereas Hamid focuses on the aspect of international monitoring and physical displacement, Kureishi focuses on the psychological tension of life in the city and social estrangement. In the end, this research concludes with the finding that despite the geography or generation, the postcolonial subject is still left in a state of permanent unbelonging in which the question of identity in the diaspora is never a destination but a continuous negotiation system that is influenced by history, race, and the unending burden of colonial histories.