Replaced nationality: cultural migration in the fiction of\ud Bharati Mukherjee and Yasmine Gooneratne

In this lecture John McLaren discusses the novels by Bharati Mukherjee and Yasmine Gooneratne which have both written about people displaced from colonised societies, where the characters have belonged to the majority culture, to settler societies where they have been now in a minority. In both cases the migration has been from countries governed by British institutions where the upper classes have rested their security on British customs that they now find under violent challenge. The novels John McLaren discusses in this paper describe in perfectly standard forms of English the act of migration as a process which enables the subject to free herself from both colonial and native stereotypes