SOURCE: Racker, David. “Shiva Naipaul: Fragmented Traces as Material for Fictive Stereotypes.” West Virginia University Philological Papers 40 (1994-95): 50-5.

In the following essay, Racker discusses the reasons for Naipaul's ambivalent sense of racial identity, comparing him to other cosmopolitan writers and applying Homi Bhabha's theories on racism to Naipaul's situation.

As a citizen of a formerly colonized and culturally mixed Caribbean nation and as a writer who lived in London and wrote about the Third World for a Western audience, Shiva Naipaul has been the object of criticism by critics from both the Third World and from America and Britain. As the younger brother of V. S. Naipaul, he has been, not always to his benefit, an object of comparison. My intent in this paper is not to compare Shiva Naipaul to V. S. Naipaul but to lay out a theory of the younger writer's fiction derived from...