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Problematizing national/cultural affiliations in postcolonial literature: Inclusions and exclusions in the reception of Doris Lessing and V. S. Naipaul

This article compares the reception and categorization of the work of Doris Lessing and V. S. Naipaul, two well-known writers who grew up in the colonies and arrived in Britain in 1949 and 1950, respectively. After her childhood and young adulthood in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Doris Lessing settled in London at the age of 30, where she was immediately included as a British writer, despite her own self-identification as African. Naipaul, who arrived from his native Trinidad on a scholarship to Oxford at the age of 18, also settled permanently in Britain (despite frequent travels), and yet his Britishness has always been much more qualified and contested. This essay interrogates the assumptions about national and cultural affiliations underlying the critical reception of Naipaul and Lessing. It argues that despite the obviously cosmopolitan nature of both writers and their works, the readier inclusion of Lessing as a “British” writer and the concomitant “othering” of Naipaul is explained less by the content of their writing than by two other key factors. The first is the racialized contrast between their backgrounds as settler and colonial subject, respectively. The second is the role of both writers in constructing their own authorial persona, and, from this perspective, the article interrogates Naipaul’s motives for insistently claiming an “outsider” status for himself.