South Asian Diaspora Literature

Unlocking the Potential of the Kashmiri Diaspora in the Big Society for Development and Just Peace

by Sardar Aftab Khan

The people of Jammu and Kashmir are homogeneous in their broader national and territorial identity, but very diverse... more The people of Jammu and Kashmir are homogeneous in their broader national and territorial identity, but very diverse in their cultural, linguistic and racial identities. The Kashmiri diaspora has always been recognised for their qualitative strength of mutual cooperation, self-help support mechanisms and strong links with their place of origin through family structures, business and inheritance interests in Jammu and Kashmir. In addition, the
quantitative strength, contribution and capacity of the Kashmiri diaspora to influence change in the development of their chosen places of abode and origin needs recognition and in-depth
study to unlock their real potential.
This paper will identify the common bonds of identity and traditions of those people in UK whose ethnic heritage comes from the state of Jammu and Kashmir. The paper will further
look at the impact of the non-recognition and non-inclusion of the Kashmiri community in British ethnic monitoring systems at the national level and ask how this will influence their
social mobility.
The paper particularly focuses on their role as a diaspora community and explores what role the Kashmiri diaspora leadership plays in community development in the ‘big’ society and what strategies they employ to influence policy and change in their current places of abode and in Jammu Kashmir? Therefore, the Kashmiri diaspora community in the United Kingdom will be the community of interest as a case study in this paper for the broader question of diaspora
engagement for development and peace.

Issue 5.2 Performing Arts and South Asian Literature, Editorial

by Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings

Issue 10.2 Michael Ondaatje: Critical Perspectives Table of Contents

by Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings

Legal Pluralism In Conflict: Coping With Cultural Diversity In Law

by Prakash Shah

This book is published as Prakash Shah (2005): Legal Pluralism In Conflict: Coping With Cultural Diversity In Law. London: Glass House.

The Going Home Syndrome in Monica Ali's Brick Lane

by Sabine Lauret

published in India and the Diasporic Imagination, L'Inde et l'imagination diasporique, eds. Rita Christan & Judith Misrahi-Barak, PULM, 2011.

Born in Dhaka and educated in England, Monica Ali writes from what Homi K. Bhabha defined as an interstitial space in... more Born in Dhaka and educated in England, Monica Ali writes from what Homi K. Bhabha defined as an interstitial space in The Location of Culture. In her debut novel, Brick Lane (2003), Nazneen, a young Bangladeshi girl is married off to Chanu, a man nearly twice her age who tries to be a “Big Man” in London. She does not speak English and knows nothing of the city. Images of the Golden Bengal collide with the bricks of Bangla Town. Through Nazneen’s eyes, the reader witnesses the shaping of a multicultural community in a context of social and racial unrest. This paper aims at showing how Monica Ali challenges the notion of belonging. She illustrates with her different characters how the diasporic prism distorts reality. The account she gives of the immigrants’ life is moving and exposes the paradox of the yearning for the home country. What is it to be home? What does it mean to go back home when home is a country you have never seen before? The métissage of a new identity thus implies the creation of an “imaginary homeland” to use Rushdie’s words, or rather of an imaginary borderland.

Rama in Exile: The Indian Writer Overseas

by John Thieme

Publsihed in The Eye of the Beholder, ed. Maggie Butcher, London: Commonwealth Institute, 1983: 65-74.

Originally a paper given at a literary conference at the Commonwealth Institute -- part of the 1982 Festival of India (London).

3 poems

by Ahmar Mahboob

Journal of post-colonial cultures and societies

1. For Abbi: A year past
2. The crescent moon
3. Butterflies

5 poems by Ahmar Mahboob

by Ahmar Mahboob

Journal of Post-Colonial Cultures and Societies

1. Rains in Karachi
2. Metaphors
3. Door hinge
4. An embrace
5. Love you always 1. Rains in Karachi
2. Metaphors
3. Door hinge
4. An embrace
5. Love you always

Ramone, J. (forthcoming) ‘Sweet-talker, Street-walker: speaking desire on the London street in postcolonial diaspora writing by women’

by Jenni Ramone

in Gwynne, J. and Poon, A. (eds), Sexuality and Contemporary Fiction. New York: Cambria.

Keith Tester in his work on the flâneur raises the question of “whether women could (can) walk the streets or whether,... more Keith Tester in his work on the flâneur raises the question of “whether women could (can) walk the streets or whether, instead, women were (are) fated […] to be only streetwalkers”. Is the woman walking on the street condemned to be a streetwalker? Or does her role depend on her opportunity to negotiate for herself a walking place and a speaking place and a desiring space on the street? If she can locate a space to speak, to walk, and to desire, she can both withstand the postcolonial diaspora condition and overcome patriarchal claims from within her own community about her status as a desiring subject. The essay considers feminist poststructuralist work on speaking and desire, the flâneur, flâneuse and the postcolonial flâneuse, and research on the history of streetwalkers in London, whose “carnal conversation” (Henderson 31) – a euphemism for the prostitute’s sexual encounter with her client – forms the background for the postcolonial diaspora woman’s difficulty in talking on the London street.

‘So Few Rainbows Any More’? Cinema, Nostalgia and the Concept of ‘Home’ in Salman Rushdie’s Fiction’

by John Thieme

Le Simplegadi: Rivista internazionale on-line di lingue e letterature moderne , 2 (2004).
Originally a paper delivered at the ‘Narratives of “Home” in South Asian Literature’ Conference, SOAS, University of London, June 2004.
Hard copy publication in English Studies 2004, Turin: Trauben, 2004: 21-31.

'What can brown do for you?': Indo Chic and the fashionability of South Asian styles

by Anita Mannur

The Home and the School In the Educational Achievements of South Asians

by Tahir Abbas

Borne Confused? Transnational Challenges of Translation: Tanuja Desai Hidier’s Born Confused

by Joel Kuortti

MikaEL: Kääntämisen ja tulkkauksen tutkimuksen symposiumin verkkojulkaisu – Electronic proceedings of the KäTu symposium on translation and interpreting studies 3 (2009) [2010]. Chief ed. Minna Kumpulainen.

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in post-colonial and transnational translation. This interest stems on... more Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in post-colonial and transnational translation. This interest stems on the one hand from the increasing cultural contacts in a globalizing world and on the other from the emphatic focus on representation of the Other in post-colonial theory. On the basis of such changes it can be assumed that translations change, too. If earlier there has been interest in translating the Other as „exotic‟, it can be argued that attention is now paid more to the intricacies of intercultural dialogue.

In my article, I look at the Finnish translation of one book, namely Tanuja Desai Hidier‟s youth novel Born confused (2002) translated as Sopivasti sekaisin (2004).1 I consider the strategies that the original and the translation use for making connections between the familiar and the strange. I also look at the ways in which intercultural dialogue is expressed in the novel and how this comes through in the translation. My main point is to look at what is borne across in translation: confusion or understanding?

‘I want to be surprised when I hear your voice’: Who Speaks for Jasmine?

by Ryan Singh Paul

Published in Indian Writers: Transnationalims and Diasporas. Eds. Jaspal K. Singh and Rajendra Chetty. New York: Peter Lang, 2009.

South Asian Women at Home and Abroad: A Guide to Resources

by Jyotsna Vaid

An Interview with Jhumpa Lahiri

by Julia Leyda

Contemporary Women's Writing 5.1 (2011)

ジュンパ・ラヒリは「移民作家」か [Jhumpa Lahiri: beyond the immigrant frame (in Japanese)]

by Julia Leyda

Trans. Hogara Matsumoto. ソフィア 58.2 (2009): 189-209.

SILENCED MAJORITY

by Suresh Pillai

Written in 2005-06 . Edited four times.

It is an essay reflectinhg on how Indians in Guyana, even being a majority are silenced both by their own government... more It is an essay reflectinhg on how Indians in Guyana, even being a majority are silenced both by their own government and larger society

Canadian Literatures Beyond the Colour Line: Re-Reading the Category of South-Asian Canadian Literature

by Diana Lobb

This dissertation examines current academic approaches to reading South Asian-Canadian literature as a multicultural... more This dissertation examines current academic approaches to reading South Asian-Canadian literature as a multicultural “other” to Canadian national literature and proposes an alternative reading strategy that allows for these texts to be read within a framework of South Asian diasporic subjectivities situated specifically at the Canadian location. Shifting from the idea that “Canada” names a particular national identity and national literary culture to the idea that “Canada” names a particular geographic terrain at which different cultural, social, and historical vectors intersect and are creolized allows for a more nuanced reading of South Asian-Canadian literature, both in terms of its relationship to the complex history of the South Asian diaspora and in terms of the complex history of South Asian encounters with the Canadian space. Reading prose, poetry, drama, and theatrical institutions as locations where a specifically South Asian-Canadian diasporic subjectivity is reflected, I am able to map a range of individual negotiations among the cultural vector of the “ancestral” past, the cultural vector of the influence of European colonialism, and the cultural vector of this place that demonstrate that the negotiation of South Asian-Canadian diasporic subjectivity and its reflection in literature cannot be understood as producing a homogenous or “authentic” cultural identity. Instead, the literary expression of South Asian-Canadian diasporic subjectivity argues that the outcome of negotiations between cultural vectors that take place in this location are as unique as the individuals who undertake those negotiations. These individual negotiations, I argue, need to be read collectively to trace out a continuum of possible expressions of South Asian-Canadian diasporic subjectivity, a continuum that emphasizes that the processes of negotiation are on-going and flexible. This dissertation challenges the assumption that Canadian literature can be contained within the limits of a Canadian nationalist mythology or ethnography. Instead of the literature of the Canadian “nation” or the Canadian “people,” Canadian literature is best understood as the literature produced in this location by all the “minority” populations, including the dominant “minority.” Reading Canadian literature, then, is reading the differential relationships to history and community that occur in this place and which are inscribed in these collectively Canadian texts.

Competing Hegemonies: Can Suniti Namjoshi Be Named 'Black British'?

by Serena Guarracino

published in "Textus" 23 (2010), pp. 421-436

Born in Western Maharashtra and now living between Devon (UK) and India, Suniti Namjoshi does not comfortably fit into... more Born in Western Maharashtra and now living between Devon (UK) and India, Suniti Namjoshi does not comfortably fit into the frame of Black British/South Asian diaspora writers. As a matter of fact, her work heavily problematizes the current mainstream perception of Indo-English culture (as exemplified in British music and cinema as well as in the works of writers such as Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith and Monica Ali) as a marketable commodity in the Western global imaginary in order to underscore the challenge Hindu culture offers to Western identity-making narratives. Her focus on the activity of ‘making stories’ produces a proliferation of signifiers where English may even become an ‘exotic’ language in relationship with the equally hegemonic Hindu milieu. In the face of both, Namjoshi takes a radical political stance, deeply ingrained in the construction of her writer persona, a point clearly made in her ‘autobiographical myth’ Goja: “I belong to India and to the West. Both belong to me and both reject me. I have to make sense of what has been and what there is”.
This essay offers an overview of Namjoshi’s writing, focusing on her reworking of the English canon (from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland to Shakespeare’s The Tempest), but also on her dialogic and sometimes conflictual relationship with both feminist and postcolonial theory, as her idea of identity as ever-changing owes to Hindi beliefs on reincarnation as much as to Judith Butler’s theories on performativity. In her works, Namjoshi shapes a veritable ‘third space’ where Western theory does not assume primacy in the definition of herself as postcolonial subject and where cultural affiliation can be articulated only in brackets, through the reworking of the many narratives that make up Namjoshi’s multivoiced writing.