Kiran Desai and Kazuo Ishiguro: Worlding Diasporic Literature between the Local and the Global in The Inheritance of Loss and an Artist of The Floating World

Abstract

This paper offers an intertextual reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of The Floating World (1986) and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006). It explores how both texts manage the circuits of the international book market as commodities conscious of the stakes involved in addressing a global audience and cognizant of their translinguistic and transcultural vocations. The paper probes the discursive sites built by the two texts while oscillating between the will to defy the discourse of globalization and the urge to comply with the demand for exoticism in the Western mainstream literary market.