Introduction

Transnational Identities 285
When prominent migrants such as Rushdie or Edward Said describe their migrant
experience as not only alienating but also empowering and full of new possibilities
(Rushdie 15; Said xxvii), this is often criticized as an elitist attitude. For
example, Boehmer states that such feelings only apply to a small number of welleducated
migrants who profited from moving to a “more comfortable location in
the wider neo-colonial world” (231; see also Griem 269). She further claims that
such migrant literature is characterized by “historical ‘weightlessness’” as the following
quote details:
In summary, postcolonial migrant literature can be described as a literature
written by élites, and defined and canonized by élites. It is writing which
foregrounds and celebrates a national or historical rootlessness – what the
migrant Czech writer Milan Kundera might call lightness – sometimes accentuated
by political cynicism. Yet, viewed from a different angle, weightlessness
could also be interpreted as an evacuation of commitment, or as a
dilution of those fiery concerns which originally distinguished postindependence
writing. To define a literature of migrant floating as the culmination
of the postcolonial must inevitably represent a diminution in a
long tradition of self-consciously political writing. (Boehmer 233)
For Boehmer, current postcolonial migrant writing is clearly inferior to earlier
postcolonial literature that was engaged with national concerns (Boehmer 225).
For her, not showing a rootedness in specific nations appears to equal a transition
to apolitical and weightless writing. 2 Moreover, she claims, its weightlessness is
what makes this literature much more popular in the West than postcolonial writing
with “a more national focus” (Boehmer 233). This echoes a general criticism
towards recent postcolonial literature that it is supposedly marked by inauthenticity
(Innes 197-98) and “centred on, and largely catering to, the West” (Huggan,
qtd. in Innes 199). Such postcolonial writing is accused of being of little importance
to readers in the authors’ countries of origin since its focus on topics such as
hybridity and alienation through migration supposedly does not concern non-
Western readers without a migrant background. However, it is assumed that this
particular subject matter in turn opens up possibilities of publication and recognition
in the West (Huggan, qtd. in Innes 198). While a critique of such selective
publishing and funding is certainly not unjustified, C.L. Innes doubts the generality
of such claims by pointing out that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, which
has a clear national focus and is nevertheless a canonical postcolonial text, is also
2 Boehmer nevertheless admits that there are political cosmopolitan fictions, naming Arundhati
Roy’s The God of Small Things as one of them, and says that she overdramatized the situation in
the above quote to point out the “basic distinctions” (233).