Performing Britishness: tactical self performance and conditional belonging in Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia.

This paper examines how Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia as a literary text explores the conditional belonging of characters with immigrant background in post-imperial Britain. While previous studies have focused on racism, marginalization, mimicry, and hybridity, this study argues that Kureishi presents identity as a form of tactical self-performance – a strategic and ambivalent way in which the racialized subjects negotiate recognition in an unequal structure of social belonging. Drawing on de Certeau’s distinction between tactics and strategies, alongside postcolonial theories of representation, hybridity, and cultural identity, this paper analyzes how characters such as Karim, Haroon, and Jamila negotiate racialized expectations, cultural stereotypes, and social exclusion imposed upon them. Karim’s mixed-race and bisexual self-fashioning, Haroon’s transformation into a spiritual guru, and Jamila’s refusal of prescribed gender roles reveal that identity in the novel is neither simple assimilation nor pure resistance. Rather, Kureishi shows that postcolonial subjects tactically use performance to gain visibility, mobility, and agency, even as such performances remain constrained by racialized expectations of Britishness. This research contributes to debates on cultural and national identity by showing how The Buddha of Suburbia reimagines Britishness as a contested and performative field shaped by empire, race, sexuality, gender, and urban space.