The uses and limitations of humour in postcolonial immigrant literature: The Mimic Men, Admiring Silence and White Teeth

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the employment of humour as a tool of resistance and protection in the cross-cultural encounters by the postcolonial immigrants of the metropolis. Subversive humour, which has proven to be a strategy of social protest since the Classical Ages, takes the distinct quality of being counter-discursive in postcolonial immigrant fiction. The comparison of the primary sources, The Mimic Men, by Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul, Admiring Silence by Adbulrazak Gurnah and White Teeth by Zadie Smith posit humour as an alternative mode of destabilizing the established binary between the colonizer and the colonized. Parallel to the current postcolonial tendency of "writing back" at the center of power to reclaim the agency of the ex-colonized, postcolonial humour attempts to "laugh back" at the metropolitan center to criticize their self-legitimizing codes of colonial dominion. Through their humorous criticism, all the three novels question history and ancestry as pillar of cultural identity and denounce these sources of inequality with their humorous approach. In the course of this study, Stewart Hall's notion of cultural identity and Hayden White's narrative theory set the cultural and narrative frame of humour employed in The Mimic Men, Admiring Silence and White Teeth.