Tracing Nationalism in Zia Haider Rahman’s In The Light of What We Know and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

This thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MA in English Language and Literature of East West University, Dhaka, BangladeshDiaspora literature raises issues of immigrant‟s crisis in a distant land and national value is always a concern of identity and existence. Culture, belongingness, root and mother land are the basis of identity and nationalism is the ideology behind forming those ideas. Rahman and Ali‟s novels In The Light of What We Know and Brick Lane significantly contribute to diaspora literature to a great extent. Nationalism is an innate ideology that creates an imaginary world within a world and individuals are attached to the ancestral home land which is the source of their identity. This paper intends to analyze Rahman and Ali‟s transnational characters as nationalists in various contexts. Though these characters live in a distant land but they always keep good connection with the home land. The first chapter of this paper explores the notion of classical nationalism in In The Light of What We Know and Brick Lanein light of Anderson‟s Imagined Community where culture and community play a major role of identity. The following chapter will discuss about globalized nationalism called long-distance nationalism where immigrants maintain strong connection and loyalty to the ancestral land by contributing in many ways. The final chapter deals with neo-colonialism in both the texts on the basis of Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism to explore the nationalistic agenda of the neo-colonizer. By analyzing different characters and events, this paper explores the nationalist approach of both the writers in In The Light of What We Know and Brick Lane