Postcolonial Masculinities: A Study of Some Contemporary British Texts

This research project seeks to examine a
group of contemporary British texts in order
to learn something about masculinities in
response to the cross-racial intra-male power
dynamics that is involved in the postcolonial
condition. These texts include V. S.
Naipaul’s “In a Free State” and Guerrillas;
Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette,
Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and The Buddha
of Suburbia; Timothy Mo’s The Redundancy
of Courage; and Peter Greenaway’s The
Pillow Book. These seemingly disparate
texts are chosen and grouped together for
analysis here because they all intriguingly
figure homosexuality— either as a crossracial
relationship between a white man and
his racially othered partner or simply in a
man considered to be of other races— in a
conspicuously postcolonial situation. And
upon critical analysis, this intriguing
presence, though its specific function differs
slightly from text to text, is found to possess a signifying valency that can be understood
only when integrating it into the intricate
system of significations (read: allegories)
which each text forms.