DIASPORA, MIGRATION, AND CULTURAL HYBRIDITY IN GLOBAL ANGLOPHONE LITERATURE: BELONGING, RACE, AND TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITY

Abstract

Contemporary migration narratives frequently unsettle the assumption that movement from one country to another produces a simple transition from one stable identity to another. Migration may alter family relations, racial classification, language, cultural practice, and the meaning of home. This article examines these processes through Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West (2017). Read comparatively, the three novels present different forms of mobility: planned migration and intergenerational settlement in Lahiri, educational migration and return in Adichie, and forced displacement represented through speculative doorways in Hamid. The analysis draws on Homi K. Bhabha’s account of cultural hybridity and the “third space,” Stuart Hall’s formulation of diasporic identity, and Avtar Brah’s concept of diaspora space. It argues that these novels represent belonging as an unfinished negotiation rather than a choice between an original homeland and a destination country. Names, food, hair, accent, citizenship, religious practice, memory, and intimate relationships become sites at which cultural identity is revised and contested. The article also distinguishes international migration from forced displacement so that different forms of mobility are not collapsed into a single experience. By placing literary representations alongside contemporary migration data, the study shows how Global Anglophone fiction can connect large-scale movements of people with the everyday negotiations through which individuals make, lose, and remake a sense of home.