Paradigms of Diversity in Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia
Autor
Wallhead, Celia M.Fecha
1994Resumen
In this paper we put to the test a model for assessing cultural
exchange and cultural identity in the post-modern and post-colonial
world. The model is suggested by Arjun Appadurai in the article ‘Disjuncture
and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’ and it consists
of five paradigms or terms coined on the nucleus ‘-scape’:
ethnoscape, finanscape, technoscape, mediascape and ideoscape. This
model recognises the importance of new social groupings caused by
mobility and hence new identities based on how people now see themselves.
The modern world is an interactive system in which centuriesold
cultural transactions between social groups have been intensified,
speeded up or modified through technological developments affecting
power economies, transportation and information. The model has
been applied to a fictitious world contained in a 1990s novel of cultural
identities, set in the London of the 1970s and 1980s: Hanif
Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia.