Between Two Shores: Intergenerational Negotiations of Home and Identity in Adib Khan's Seasonal Adjustments

Abstract: This study examines Adib Khan’s novel Seasonal Adjustments (1994) through the lens of postcolonial theory to project how its protagonist, Iqbal Choudhury, continually negotiates multiple, yet conflicting, identities across Bangladeshi and Australian contexts. Focusing on hybridity (Homi Bhabha), subalternity (Gayatri Spivak), and the reflections on exile (Edward Said), the paper ignites such questions as how do cultural memory, religion, and geographical displacement influence the sense of self-identification of Iqbal and, consequently, his daughter Nadine in terms of her forming the identity? Close readings portray that the sense of living in two worlds that Iqbal describes as dual consciousness is expressed through ambivalent bonds with home and host, fantasies of the orient and lived experience. These difficulties experienced by Nadine, the protagonist’s daughter, also mark the issue of intergenerational transmission of diasporic tensions as she struggles in both of the environments. With this analysis of father-daughter relationships rooted in the more general discussion of diaspora and the development of third space, this paper reveals fundamental conflicts of identity formation between the two and the permanent construction of a sense of home. The fact that plural identities in the story by Khan are not bottled but dynamically created on the basis of memory, power, and a cross-cultural encounter has been established in the findings.

Keywords: Identity, Intergenerational, Diaspora, Alienation, Hybridity