Hybridity as Agency for the Post-colonial Migrant: Gabrielle Watling Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine and Sara Suleri's Meatless Days

While there is clearly some measure of truth in Simon During's contention that theories of post-colonial hybridity are Western academic inventions which often serve to limit the celebration of indigenous cultures,1 the hybridity produced by Third World migration to the West nevertheless demands responses which can read and theorize the various negotiations between migrant and host. Whereas the 'first wave' of post-colonial migration led chiefly to Britain and to such bleak allegorical accounts of the barriers to communication between migrant and host in times of social, political and demographic change as Janet Frame's The Edge of the Alphabet (1962) and V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men (1967), subsequent narratives on the topic have been less pessimistic.