picture frames
british asian fiction framing the contemporary
in this outstanding collection of essays editors neil murphy and wai chew sim seek not so much to demarcate the field of british asian fiction but to offer due acknowledgment of the artistic merit of the works of selected authors and simultaneously register their cultural significance . this volume demonstrates in situ the virtues of commentary that engages in a substantial manner with formal and aesthetic considerations even as it implicates the discourses of alterity that dominate contemporary cultural criticism . additionally the essays delineate the complex subject positions explored by authors and texts and focus on the way writers negotiate the exigencies of their location within and between different social formations . if it is the case that british literature can no longer be discussed in monocultural terms because of the impact of the writers under consideration it is also the case that the diverse trans cultural positions they explore are often less specified than proclaimed . addressing difference commensurability and form related notions of truth content these essays enlarge our understanding of the range of british and affiliated identities as well as the cultural contexts from which they arose . working as academics and critics from singapore a useful vantage point murphy and sim have extended the parameters of british asian to include not just writers from south asia as is traditionally the case but writers whose parents or who themselves have migrated to britain from other regions of asia for example japan hong kong and malaysia . this initiative has made it possible for professors murphy and sim to bring together first an interestingly varied group ofauthors among them those who came to prominence in the 1980ssalman rushdie timothy mo kazuo ishiguroas well as their younger contemporariesmeera syal romesh gunesekera monica ali hari kunzru ooi yang may ; and second a broad and diverse range of novels that span timothy mos sour sweet 1982 and tariq alis a sultan in palermo 2005 the fourth volume in his islam quintet .