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Framing Minority Belonging: Cognitive Metaphors, Translanguaging, and Cultural Memory in South Asian Anglophone Fiction

Xinyue He¹, Haoyang He²*

Advances in Linguistics Research / 2026,8(3): 279-294 / 2026-07-03 17 12

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• Information:

  1. Department of Chinese Language and Literature, School of Chinese Language and Literature, Jiangxi Normal University, Nanchang, China;
  2. Department of Communication, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Beijing Normal–Hong Kong Baptist University, Zhuhai, China

• Keywords:
  Cognitive Metaphor; Postcolonial Identity; South Asian Anglophone Fiction; Cultural Cognition; Translanguaging; Minority Narrative; Cognitive Discourse Analysis
• Abstract: South Asian Anglophone fiction has often been examined as a field of postcolonial history, migration, and cultural identity, yet its relevance to language-and-cognition research remains insufficiently specified. This article develops a qualitative cognitive discourse analysis of minority belonging in four South Asian Anglophone narratives: Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire. It asks how cognitive metaphors structure minority identity, how translanguaging and culturally loaded expressions frame belonging, displacement, and memory, and how these linguistic-cognitive patterns disclose postcolonial forms of cultural cognition under globalization. Drawing on conceptual metaphor theory, frame semantics, conceptual blending, narrative cognition, translanguaging practices and postcolonial identity theory, this article puts forward a Cognitive-Postcolonial Framing Model of Minority Identity. The analysis reveals that home is conceptualized as a memory container, a moral origin, an unstable territory and an imagined horizon; border, body, and language function as deictic frames through which diasporic subjects negotiate visibility and exclusion; and translanguaging markers operate as cognitive anchors that resist monolingual assimilation. The article contributes to cognitive linguistics by extending metaphor and framing analysis into postcolonial minority narratives, and to South Asian Anglophone studies by specifying how language organizes cultural cognition rather than merely reflecting identity.
• DOI: 10.35534/lin.0803024 (registering DOI)
• Cite: He, X. Y., & He, H. Y. (2026).Framing Minority Belonging: Cognitive Metaphors, Translanguaging, and Cultural Memory in South Asian Anglophone Fiction. Advances in Linguistics Research, 8(3), 279-294.