Kini, Ashvin R.

The intangible nature of the border leads to a wide array of implications for Latinx migrants. By dissociating borders from the literal space that commonly defines the word, borders can be put into conversation along with the institution of the university. By situating this paper in the larger scholarly discussion of the border and university critique it is possible to see how these intersections result in violent realities for Latinx migrants. Roberto Bolaño’s novel, 2666 provides a means to map out the violent realities that universities manifest for Latinx migrants. The feminicide pandemic in the fictional town of Santa Teresa mirrors the very real violence that happens toward Latinx among these border cultures. In the shadow of the university, violence against Latinx prospers to unknowable heights and a question emerges. Is it possible to determine the extent of damage the university causes Latinx migrants? The answer is unthinkable, but this paper is a means not to answer this difficult question in complete but to begin assessing the damage.

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.