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That cultural identity is a fluid const, necessarily in a state of flux, is a central argument in Stuart Hall's meditations on the diasporic individual. Suggesting that diasporic individuals must continually negotiate the shifts between their respective positionalities, he speaks of his own situation as being neither wholly Jamaican nor wholly British.
Having been prepared by the colonial education, I knew England from the inside. But I'm not and never will be "English." I know both places intimately, but I am not wholly of either place. And that's exactly the diasporic experience, far away enough to experience the sense of exile and loss, close enough to understand the enigma of an always-postponed individual.1 (My italics)
Knowing two spaces intimately yet not being entirely of either place is the central conflict for young adults who move from one space to another during their tumultuous adolescent years. In the short story "East End at Your Feet" (in East End at Your Feet; London: MacMillan, 1976), by Farrukh Dhondy, and the novel Ordinary Magic (published as Ganesh in 1983; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993), by Malcolm Bosse, the adolescent's relationship to "home" in the diasporic context is a central focus. Kashyap, the protagonist of "East End at Your Feet," is the son of Indian immigrants living in London's East End; and Ganesh, or Jeffrey Moore, is a White American boy, born and raised in India as an "Indian" by his parents. The difficulties associated with being minorities in their "homes" in England and India is a fact of life for these young adults, but their lives are further complicated when they move "back" to India and the United States during their teenage years. The struggle to understand their ethnic identity becomes particularly acute when they leave the place they have known as "home" for another place that is supposedly their "real" home. Having grown up as an ethnic and racial minority in given national spaces, both must perform the complicated task of defining home and ethnic identity once they are estranged from their country of birth.
Definitions of "Home": Forces of Descent and Consent
One similarity between "East End at Your Feet" and Ordinary Magic is that the protagonists are uprooted from the culture that they...