Background: Postcolonial literary theory has long grappled with the question of how formerly colonised subjects negotiate identity within metropolitan and diasporic spaces. Anglophone fiction from South Asia and the Caribbean offers particularly fertile comparative terrain, as both traditions share colonial histories while retaining distinct cultural, linguistic, and geographic specificities.

Objective: This study undertakes a comparative close reading of selected novels from South Asian and Caribbean Anglophone literary traditions, analysing how authors deploy narrative strategies of hybridity, mimicry, and ambivalence as theorised by Homi Bhabha to dramatise the diasporic experience of identity negotiation in postcolonial contexts.

Method: A qualitative comparative textual analysis grounded in postcolonial theory, particularly Homi Bhabha's concepts of the 'third space,' mimicry, and hybridity, and Stuart Hall's theorisation of diasporic identity, was applied to a purposively selected corpus of six novels (three South Asian, three Caribbean). Close reading, discourse analysis, and intertextual comparison constitute the primary analytical methods.

Key Results: The analysis reveals convergent patterns: both traditions employ code-switching as a literary device to mark the liminal subject position of diasporic protagonists; both utilise unreliable narration to destabilise singular, essentialist identity claims; and both dramatise the generational fracture between first and second-generation immigrant characters as the primary site of identity conflict. Divergences emerge in the treatment of religion and the body as loci of cultural negotiation.