Fetishising the Dominant Culture in Migration Narratives: Examining Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Bharati Mukhejree’s Jasmine and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

This thesis addresses the ideological underpinnings in the migration narratives of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (2003), Bharati Mukhejree’s Jasmine (1989) and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) in order to reveal how certain meanings become more legitimate than others. In my discussion I expose the ways a narrative can be shaped and aligned such that it appears to provide agency for the migrant character, particularly in respect to inviting the notion of desire, feminist discourses, human rights, alienation, yet fails to challenge the structure of the dominant culture. To sum my argument up, Reading Lolita in Tehran, Jasmine, and Brick Lane do indeed engage with the dominant discourses of migration, yet they are infested with ideological contradictions and political absences. Though empowering the migrant figure, such as Nafisi, Jyoti and Nazneen, is laudable, the authors’ narratives nevertheless grant the migrant the power of assimilation within the standards of the Western dominant culture without communicating the process of negotiating an identity between native and host cultures. These texts suggest that the failure of assimilation is a character flaw and represent “Third World” and “First World” cultures in a series of false dichotomies.