An Analysis of the Disadvantaged Position of Ethnic Minorities in Kureishi’s “Borderline”

“Borderline”, a play by Hanif Kureishi, portrays the multi-cultural society of Britain from a variety of perspectives and illustrates the difficulties and disadvantages of ethnic minories in a society. However, the play does not reflect the situation only from the perspective of the minorities; it tries to compare and contrast all the possible contrary perceptions in order to offer different perspectives. In the play, Kureishi attempts to lay bare the determining influence of cultural baggage on one's understanding of other people and events. This paper aims to illustrate how the characters in the play are shaped by their cultures and what kind of difficulties they experience because of the gap between the dominant culture of the host country and the minority cultures in that society.