Multicultural neoliberalism, global textiles, and the making of the indebted female entrepreneur in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

Abstract

Against the promise of happiness associated with the lures of diaspora, this chapter suggests that a consideration of the genre and form of contemporary novels such as Monica Ali’s Brick Lane can help to illuminate the ways in which late liberal discourses of multiculturalism (Povinelli 2011) are increasingly subordinated to the economic norms and values of neoliberalism. Rather than reading the narrative as a story of social mobility through transnational mobility, the chapter considers how Brick Lane inadvertently normalizes homeworking and the entrepreneurial as the horizon of freedom and assimilation for its protagonist in contemporary neoliberal British society. In so doing, it considers how the novel raises wider questions about the ways in which neoliberal discourses of self-management, personal responsibility, and the entrepreneurial cut across the gendered international division of labour between the core and the periphery.

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ORCID for Stephen Morton: orcid.org/0009-0009-5294-5640

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