Reading against the Postcolonial Grain: Migrancy and Exile in the Short Stories of Kanchana Ugbabe

Postcolonial literary criticism has been particularly concerned with the perspective of the migrant writer. It has focused repeatedly on the degree to which the experience of migration is culturally destabilizing, giving rise to a sense of truth as provisional. This critical perspective, although radical in certain respects, threatens to universalize the point of view of a middle-class, cosmopolitan literary elite. This essay considers the short stories of the Indian-born, Nigerian author Kanchana Ugbabe. It is shown that while her writing is concerned with the puzzles and ambiguities of cultural difference, it can also be seen to challenge some of the postcolonial presuppositions with regard to these issues. In particular, Ugbabe presents culture as a world of meaning with determining force for the individual. For this reason her crosscultural perspective gives rise to a recognition of homologies of experience that unite and link individuals in their specific and concrete situations, rather than the relativism typical of postcolonialism literary theory.