Emotional Geographies of Belonging in Ravinder Randhawa's Beauty and the Beast

Abstract

In their articulation of their experiences as the children of immigrants in Germany in Wir Neuen Deutschen [We New Germans], Alice Bota, Khuê Pham, and Özlem Topçu clearly express the central concern of this essay: the emotional valence of home and belonging for so-called “second-generation immigrants” who grow up in what Vijay Mishra describes as a “vacuum culture” (184), with ambiguous relationships to their parents’ country of origin as well as to that in which they are citizens. The emotional ambivalence illustrated here finds expression in Ravinder Randhawa’s Beauty and the Beast, originally published in 1992 with the title Hari-Jan. Set in the 1990s, the novel traces the complex experiences of three Asian British teens—Harjinder (Hari-jan), Ghazala, Suresh—who find themselves straddling two cultures, identities, and lands. Randhawa’s narrative poses difficult questions about home and belonging in the diasporic context where immigrant families are trapped within a liminal space, striving for recognition and a place in society. To date, Randhawa has published three novels: A Wicked Old Woman, The Coral Strand, and Beauty and the Beast. All of them focus, to differ-