ABSTRACT

This chapter foregrounds trends in contemporary Pakistani fiction wherein parents and their progenies’ idiosyncrasies are mired in sociocultural and ideological differences. Specifically, we survey these narrative trends, which encompass contemporary issues throughout the diaspora, in the novels of Nadeem Aslam, Bapsi Sidhwa, and Azhar Adizi. We demonstrate that a number of subjective variables, including homeland traditions, modernity, authority, anxiety, paranoia, assimilation, gender roles, and affiliation, coalesce into a dialectic of fiction. Through these three Pakistani diaspora writers and their diasporic narratives, our chapter explores discourses of cultural dissonance, unease, assimilation, and identity that constitute the situated subjectivities of generations of Pakistani mothers and their children residing in the West.