| dc.description | The dissertation examines the intercultural novels of Bharati Mukherjee, Michael Ondaatje and Salman Rushdie to show how their writing disturbs, unsettles and reconfigures cultures, identities, and worlds. In doing so, they deploy hybridizing techniques and stage spatiotemporal displacements to foreground the creative role of contingencies, accidental connections, and chance encounters. For all three writers, cultural hybridity---or transculturation---is a boundary negotiation or transgression, which exposes order to the disorder of chaos, flux, and upheaval, and reveals that what appears to be natural and settled on either side of the boundary is in fact disorienting and fluid. This discovery leads their characters to reconsider traditions, ancestry, community, and identity. In these writers, the liminal figure of hybridity marks unknowability and undecidability, not just contamination and mixture. I argue that their hybrid negotiations enrich our experience of the world by imaginatively opening up other possible worlds for scrutiny across time and space. I also demonstrate that narrativizing cultural hybridity is a difficult textual practice, since it erupts in utterly unpredictable and unforeseen ways, and requires the reader to interpret the effects of transculturation from the interstices, gaps and ambiguities of these intercultural novels. I discuss both the dangers and the opportunities inherent in the loss of certainty and predictability as a result of dislocation and upheaval, typically achieved through the use of ostranenie (defamiliarization); historical and cross-cultural ironies; palimpsests and double-exposures; catachrestical figures employing doubling, splitting, substitution and exchange; the rhetorical devices of chiasmus and metonymy, and the intercultural practices of mimicry, passing, and translation which occur in the border zones of cultures. | en_US |
