ABSTRACT
‘Rootless but at Home in a Britannia All His Own’, the headline from a New York Times interview with Hari Kunzru, paradoxically captures Kunzru’s sense of ‘the mutability of identity’ (Lyall 2002: np) refracted through the lens of contemporary British nationhood. This malleability may be in part due to Kunzru’s mixed parentage: his father, an orthopaedic surgeon moved to London from India in the 1960’s and married a nurse. Brought up in the middle class, predominantly white, suburb of Woodford in Essex, notably Sir Winston Churchill’s long term constituency, Kunzru went on to read English at Oxford and his portrait now graces Wadham College’s Okinaga Room as one of the college’s most celebrated alumni. Like other writers concerned with postimperial Britain such as V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Caryl Phillips, Monica Ali and Zadie Smith – all similarly Oxbridge graduates – Kunzru continues to possess a heightened wariness towards the traditions and class privileges epitomised by their alma maters as well as a constant questioning of white Englishness. Yet more so than these writers, Kunzru’s challenge to English essentialism flows from a fascination with a highly networked and globalised Britain carved from colonialism’s legacies. He most famously proclaimed his solidarity to those who continue to live out these legacies by rejecting the 2003 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for his novel The Impressionist. As ‘One of Them’, he felt that it was right to turn down ‘a literary award sponsored by the xenophobic Mail on Sunday’ (Kunzru 2003: np). Kunzru did, however, accept the Betty Trask Award and the Somerset Maugham Award for the same novel and since 2003, has garnered considerable literary accolades. This essay explores Kunzru’s major novels to date, focusing particularly on his self-conscious and consistent use of parody to portray a relentless and, at times, frightening but exhilarating globalised postmodern society, one often portrayed as a product of erstwhile European empires. While certainly many critics acknowledge Kunzru’s consistent use of parody, this essay also seeks to explore parody’s limits and limitations within Kunzru’s oeuvre.
