On the Move

The Tourist and the Flâneur in Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal's Tourism

Abstract

Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal’s Tourism (2006), as a contemporary British Asian novel, counts as postcolonial fiction yet adds a post-postcolonial and postmodern twist by presenting itself in the context of tourism. Although generally perceived as pulp fiction for its provocative themes and pornographic scenes, the novel’s portrayal of the second-generation immigrant experience, urban space and tourism invites a close reading from the perspectives of spatiality and movement, as well as an analysis that is interdisciplinary in its approach, its theoretical background situated at the intersection of tourism, cultural, postcolonial and diaspora studies. The present paper investigates Dhaliwal’s novel in terms of the relationship of identity, space and movement, or more specifically what I call mobile subjectivities: the figures of the tourist and the flâneur, and argues that the basic elements of flânerie and tourism are indispensable attributes of British Asians’ diasporic identity and experience, and thus integral to the analysis of movement and subjectivity in British Asian fiction.