Kottu Roti and Devil Dancing in Sydney: a novel Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of the Diaspora, a Sri Lankan Migrant Perspective: an exegesis

Abstract

This thesis comprises a creative component, the novel Kottu Roti and Devil Dancing in Sydney, and an exegesis examining contemporary Sri Lankan-Australian diaspora literature, including A Change of Skies by Yasmine Gooneratne, Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran and Untethered by Ayesha Inoon. Both explore how inherited cultural knowledge, shaped by historical Occidental thought, frames the West as the ‘Other’ and how this perspective is reinterpreted, challenged, and transformed through diasporic experience.

The novel, set in the fictional Sydney suburb of ‘Little Sri Lanka’, depicts a culturally hybrid and liminal space. Employing multiple narrative voices, and incorporating ritual, folklore, ancestral memory, and inventive uses of English, it explores how inherited worldviews are lived and tested. Through humour, magic-realist elements, and everyday absurdities, such as a love-struck man paralysed by Western trousers, marriage proposals that lead to spontaneous combustion, and disappearing houses, the novel shows the tensions between resistance to Western influence and the possibilities of hybridity.

The exegesis combines creative writing, autoethnography and literary analysis to trace the development of Occidentalist ideas from precolonial and colonial narratives to contemporary diasporic literature. Using the frameworks of Occidentalism (Buruma and Margalit) hybridity (Homi Bhabha) and diasporic identity (Stuart Hall), it shows how Sri Lankan diasporic literature simultaneously resists, adapts and transforms Western norms while preserving inherited cultural memory.

Together the creative and the critical components illuminate the ongoing production of hybrid identity in diaspora, highlighting the dynamic interplay of homeland, migration and cultural negotiation. The thesis positions diasporic fiction not only as a reflection of displacement but as an active site of cultural critique, survival, and reinvention.