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In 2004, the BBC screened a documentary entitled The Power of Nightmares: the Rise of the Politics of Fear. Written and produced by Adam Curtis, the documentary controversially argues that Islamist terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda are self-realising myths, encouraged by the West (particularly U.S. neoconservatives) in order to construct identifiable enemies resonant with the popular imagination. Curtis does not deny the reality of terrorism; what he denies is a well-coordinated and hidden organisation as the source of this threat. Like Curtis, Hari Kunzru sees an explicit connection between terrorism and selfhood. This chapter examines Kunzru's works, Transmission (2004) and My Revolutions (2007), in which he suggests that individuals with justifiable motives find themselves co-opted into less-ethical schemes with a group mentality which strips them of their individual subjectivity, whether such groups are imaginary (in the case of Transmission) or real (as in My Revolutions). Group identity supersedes the complexity of individual selfhood. The chapter also looks at the politics of selfhood and consciousness, as well as identity versus self.

This chapter examines three novels, written by Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai and Hari Kunzru. These novels are concerned with the feasibility of sustaining the dynamics of Nancean world-formation in the context of an ever-thickening (neo-)nationalist unrest and global glomicity. The chapter also notes that globalisation is usually held responsible for the elimination of cultural difference and replacing it with worldwide homogeneity.

This chapter critiques the continued influence of Homi Bhabha’s theories of hybridity and mimicry in the colonial context, while putting Bhabha’s ideas into dialogue with those of Roberto Retamar. Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist and Marlene van Niekerks’ Agaat offer nuanced revisions of both theorists’ positions. They elaborate versions of hybridity and mimicry that are intensely attuned to the interplay between historical forces and subjective experience; they grasp the limited yet real agency of colonized selves in fashioning responses to colonial power; and they situate colonialist textuality in a dynamic relation both to extra-discursive institutions of domination and to subjective interiority. These shared commitments result in fictional historiographies that emphasize the politically variable effects of hybridity-mimicry rather than the inevitable subversion described by Bhabha or the linguistic guerrilla warfare outlined by Retamar.

There have been Asian writers in Britain for almost as long as there have been Asians in Britain: since the seventeenth century. In the wake of mass migration from the 1950s, however, for the first time there exist in large numbers Asians born in Britain or settled since childhood, and now, as a result, British-born or British-raised Asian authors. This book focuses on the works of fiction produced by British Asians. Its central contention is that British Asian authors, who have emerged only in notable numbers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, mark the establishment of a definitive genre of British Asian literature deserving recognition in its own right. Throughout the book, the term ‘British-born/raised’ is employed in preference to the terms ‘second generation’ (for those born in Britain) or ‘1.5 generation’ (for those raised in Britain). The book examines the writings of Salman Rushdie and V. S. Naipaul, Hanif Kureishi, Ravinder Randhawa, Atima Srivastava, Nadeem Aslam, Meera Syal, Hari Kunzru, Monica Ali and Suhayl Saadi.