In postcolonial studies, early paradigms tended to stress power struggle and the influence of cultural domination in a bipolar world. Recent developments such as increased globalization, various forms of mobility ranging from short term freely-undertaken migration to permanent forced exile, not to forget the decline of the role of the nation state, have challenged existing models and raised the question of their relevance. Appadurai (1996) has stressed the opportunities brought by new technologies and people’s increased access to mobility, either virtual or real. However, the discrepancy that has developed between individuals’ rights to mobility and their actual ‘jouissance’ of those rights—linked to their capacity to make the most of the so-called mobility of the liquid modern times (Bauman)—seems to contradict Appadurai’s paradigm.
The paper investigates the problematic conversion of theoretical rights into actual ones in a two-tiered system through two novels dealing with the South Asian diaspora, Hari Kunzru’s Transmission and Kiran Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss. The title of Kiran Desai’s novel aptly sums up the lingering determinism generated by class differences which are not erased by migration but are even exacerbated. As for Kunzru, he describes a world in which daily experience of immigrants from South Asia exposes the glitches in the workings of the global village and sketches a double-layered world geography where the wealthy never cross paths with the less well-off. This particular novel also allows to evidence two modes of spatial progression, one based on continuity and the other on discontinuity.