Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

2022

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Kini, Ashvin R.

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to examine biracial family-building and the reimagination of the ideal home in post-WWII English literature using Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Focusing on biracial children of both the Caribbean and South Asian diasporas, this thesis explores the nuances with which black self-identification is curated and how blackness as both a racial and social category in the UK is prescribed and performed depending on the Black and Brown biracial characters’ social location to white characters and family units. Mark Christian’s Mulitracial Identity: An International Perspective and Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and Ambivalence operate as lenses to better understand the social classification of mixed-families individuals as strangers in England and how biracial individuals are strangers to their families and respective homelands. This thesis will also argue that Black biracial women’s identity-building is oftentimes more stifled in England than their South Asian male counterparts as it is dependent on a reconciliation with their family’s erased past.

Extent

74 p.

Comments

Includes bibliography.|Thesis (MA)--Florida Atlantic University, 2022.|FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection|Includes bibliography.

Identifier

FA00013934

Format

pdf

Download

Share

COinS