Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia : The Production of Subjectivity and Commodification

Sammanfattning: This essay aims to analyze the main characters of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia. The main characters embark on a metaphorical journey against a backdrop of turbulent socio-political changes in 1970s Britain, ending with the emergence of neoliberalism and the rise of Margaret Thatcher. While the previous research primarily focuses on the formation of identity and race, I primarily examine Kureishi’s dramatization of neoliberal tendencies in the main characters. The theoretical framework of this analysis is based on two contrastive perspectives on neoliberalism: Michel Foucault and his somewhat positive concept of the entrepreneur of the self on one side, and Fredric Jameson and concepts of pastiche and loss of historicity as negative effects of neoliberalism on the other. The main argument is that Kureishi’s dramatization of neoliberal tendencies in the main characters is complex and contrastive by simultaneously reflecting and denying Foucault and Jameson. Thus, it challenges these two theoretical perspectives, which suggests that literary works might have a significant theoretical potency.