A Corpus Stylistic Analysis of National Identity Reconstruction in Postcolonial Fiction: The Case of Burnt Shadows

The paper explores national identities in Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009) through Baker’s (2006) Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis (CADS). It analyzes five nations: America, Afghanistan, Japan, India, and Pakistan. Sketch Engine (Kilgariff et al., 2014) measures linguistic patterns related to displacement, hybridity, trauma, and postcolonial conflict, followed by qualitative analysis. Afghanistan is linked to war and fundamentalism (40% negative), America to imperialism and racism (65% negative), Japan to cultural erasure and nuclear trauma (52% negative), and India and Pakistan to identity crises from partition. Quantitative sentiment and thematic analysis examine the fluidity of global power and diasporic identity.