| Summary: | British identity has undergone a dynamic transformation over the past fifty years. The debates surrounding multiculturalism and the extent to which non-white Britons have genuinely integrated into mainstream British society have given rise to a generation of writing that arguably contends with these issues. Anglophone writers such as Monica Ali, Jamila Gavin, Maggie Gee, Raman Mundair, Ravinder Randhawa, Kami/a Shamsie, Zadie Smith and Meera Syal are amongst those contemporary writers who portray diverse aspects of Asian British communities, in which the Asian British characters arguablv subvert the Orientalist, colonialist binary of white over brown. Writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Arundhati Roy and Vikram Seth fictionally represent Indian students who come to Britain as temporary migrants on foreign study sojourns, using these students to interrogate the significance of an English education. These novels explode the reductive myth of Asian Britons as nice, well-behaved members of our multicultural society. This thesis demonstrates how these texts indeed interrogate depoliticised, sentimental portrayals of Asian Britons as harmless.
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