Chapter 5 - Multicultural Personae

Summary

In the postcolonial era, the question of identity and national affiliation becomes complex and indeterminate. This is nowhere more apparent than in a post-war Britain facing the challenges of the end of Empire and the process of national redefinition it brings with it, both in terms of international status and demographic composition. The novel has proved to be a fruitful site for investigating the hybridized cultural forms that might be produced in an evolving, and so genuinely, multicultural Britain.

This is not, however, a simple story of celebration. The migrant identities that are fictionalized in post-war writing are often embattled and vulnerable. This is sometimes due to the transitional nature of twentieth-century postcolonial expression, where postcolonial identity is properly conceived as process rather than arrival; but the evocation of vulnerability has just as frequently to do with the inhospitable nature of British, and especially English society, often portrayed as unsympathetic to the goals of a living, interactive multiculturalism.

Kazuo Ishiguro's third novel The Remains of the Day (1989), is a devastating portrait of repressed Englishness and an exploration of those national characteristics that must be expunged before an authentic post-nationalism can emerge. Even though the novel's present is 1956, and its key action occurs retrospectively in the 1920s and 1930s, Ishiguro is still concerned with perceived aspects of Englishness that retain an ideological force at the time of writing.

Ishiguro's own position, as someone born in Japan but brought up in Britain, gives him an intriguing ‘semi-detached’ or dual perspective.