Khaled Hosseini's "The Kite Runner": A Critical Discourse Analysis

The novels by the South Asian Diaspora writers invariably seek a form of narrative and a language in which they capture the trauma of colonial history with its forced migrations and slaving voyages, as well as the condition of "postcolonial" migrancy. A central theme in diasporic postcolonial literature is the negotiation of new hybrid identities. Diaspora is simply the displacement of a community/culture into another geographical and cultural location. The authors map their own experiences, as well as shared by many others, of dislocation and voice it through their fiction. There is a constant elision in diasporic narratives between the individual and the communal, the personal and the collective, even when the story of one individual or family is being told. The proposed book was aimed at undertaking a critical discourse analysis of a novel from the South Asian Diaspora to investigate how identity is constructed and represented through the language choices made in a text. Through a systematic and principled analysis of the language of the text using the tools of critical discourse analysis, this study was aimed at exploring the construction of the South Asian Diaspora identity.