CURATING BLACKNESS: MIXED-FAMILIES’ CENTRAL ROLE IN REDEFINING THE CONCEPT OF HOME IN POST-WWII ENGLAND

The aim of this thesis is to examine biracial family-building and the reimagination of the ideal home in post-WWII English literature using Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. Focusing on biracial children of both the Caribbean and South Asian diasporas, this thesis explores the nuances with which black self-identification is curated and how blackness as both a racial and social category in the UK is prescribed and performed depending on the Black and Brown biracial characters’ social location to white characters and family units. Mark Christian’s Mulitracial Identity: An International Perspective and Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and Ambivalence operate as lenses to better understand the social classification of mixed-families individuals as strangers in England and how biracial individuals are strangers to their families and respective homelands. This thesis will also argue that Black biracial women’s identity-building is oftentimes more stifled in England than their South Asian male counterparts as it is dependent on a reconciliation with their family’s erased past.