The Immigrant Experience in V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival and Z. Smith's White Teeth: An Exploration of Homi Bhabha's Postcolonial Theory

Abstract

V.S. Naipaul and Z. Smith, prominent postcolonial authors, reflect the condition of the immigrants suffering from cultural shock, hybridity, fragmentation and mimicry in the postcolonial Western societies in their novels, The Enigma of Arrival and White Teeth. The former portrays the desperate condition of an author doing his best to create his work in the postwar West, in London and New York, trying to overcome his hybridity and adaptation problems due to his cultural background, and the latter sheds light on the cultural distress of two families from Bangladesh, immigrating to London, by stressing the conflicts between the Westerners and the Easterners and between the first and the second generations of immigrants. Thus, these two novels highlight the immigrant experience illustrating the impact of power relations between the former colonized and the former colonizer upon their relationship in the postcolonial era. In this study, the problems of immigrants in the postwar West in these novels will be analysed in the light of Homi Bhabha's postcolonial theory, which puts forward such concepts as hybridity, mimicry, ambivalence, cultural differentiation and otherness. In this regard, Bhabha's theory will be adapted into these novels to identify cultural problems of immigrants in these works.