Migration and the Politics of Narrative Form: Realism and the Postcolonial Subject in Brick Lane

Migration and the Politics of Narrative Form:Realism and the Postcolonial Subject in Brick Lane Alistair Cormack (bio) Monica Ali's 2003 novel of Bangladeshi immigrants in London, Brick Lane, has been a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic. Because it is a realist narrative with a postcolonial story, it offers an excellent opportunity to examine the relationship between the formal strategies of mimetic fiction and the historical contexts of multiculturalism and immigration.1 In the chapter "Multicultural Personae" in The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Fiction, 1950-2000, Dominic Head has investigated "the hybridized cultural forms that might be produced in an evolving, and so genuinely, multicultural Britain" (156). The novels he looks at have much in common in terms of…