Performance to Haunting: Rethinking the Third Space in Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia and Smith's White Teeth

This paper looks at how post-imperial identity appears in two important works of contemporary British Asian fiction: Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia (۱۹۹۰) and Zadie Smith's White Teeth (۲۰۰۰). Many scholars have celebrated Homi K. Bhabha's idea of the "third space" as a place where hybrid identities are freeing and creative, but this study challenges that view by arguing that hybridity also has emotional and psychological costs that postcolonial criticism has mostly ignored. Using recent work in postcolonial trauma studies (Pérez Zapata, ۲۰۲۳), affect theory (Ahmed, ۲۰۰۰), and rhizomatic subjectivity (Aldemir, ۲۰۲۵), the paper identifies a generational change within British Asian fiction. In Kureishi's novel, we see performative hybridity: the exhausting but necessary performance of otherness in order to survive. In Smith's novel, we see transgenerational haunting: the involuntary inheritance of colonial trauma that cannot be performed away. Through a close reading of Karim Amir's theatrical work in Kureishi and Samad Iqbal's "colonial amnesia" in Smith, the paper shows that the third space is not always liberating and does not stay the same across generations. Located at the crossroads of literary theory, memory studies, and the sociology of migration, this analysis contributes to ongoing discussions about how contemporary fiction deals with colonial histories across generations. Finally, the paper suggests that Smith's later novels, as well as the work of other British Asian writers like Kamila Shamsie and Sunjeev Sahota, continue to move beyond the celebration of hybridity toward more complex engagements with the colonial past.

کلیدواژه ها:

postcolonial trauma ، hybridity ، affect theory ، British Asian fiction ، transgenerational memory ، Kureishi