Paradigms of Diversity in Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia

Abstract

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.