Negotiating British Identity In The “Global Kitchen”

Monica Ali is an influential Bangladeshi-born British novelist.Her third novel In the Kitchen is widely received and animates numerous favourable comments.Grounded in the context of post-Thatcherite neoliberalism and multicultural London,the novel draws attention to the thematic aspect of the transformation in British identity as engendered by contemporary globalized capitalism and increasing numbers of migrant laborers.Apart from the introduction and conclusion,this research is divided into three chapters.Chapter one is targeted at examining the topological images of the imperial hotel and Lancashire hometown as microcosm of hierarchical British society in such a marketing-oriented epoch.Chapter two begins with migrant staff’s maximum manipulation of their free wills and personal interests to display the process of their negotiating a Third Space out of the oppressive working environment,and by demonstrating Gabriel’ s migrating experiences in the onion farmland as well as his shifted notions regarding immigrants’ roles and statuses,accounts for the English protagonist’s reasserting a hybrid,tolerant British citizenship in the globalized London.Chapter three expounds the executive chef’s mental trajectory and psychic predicaments so that the unreliability of his former exclusive and fixed assumptions of British identity are disclosed,with which to articulate the necessity of revising a conventional understanding of Britishness into a broader and more dynamic one.With the employment of the spatial narrative theory as a critical tool,this project not only reveals Ali’ s interrogation of the exploitative social networks within contemporary London,but also explores the way this novel unveils the crisis underlying a traditional notion of British identity for the suggestion of negotiating an alternative viewpoint toward migrant populations under globalized circumstances.