Diaspora Poetics In South Asian English Writings

This volume brings together various discussions on various South Asian Diaspora writers of diverse sociopolitical backgrounds. It provides perspectives drawn from border studies, philosophical studies, and regional issues of South Asia.

In this study, ten independent critical essays and a coda explore the English-language poetry of South Asians in terms of time, place, themes and poetic methodologies. The transnational perspective taken establishes connections between colonial and postcolonial South Asian poetry in English as well as the poetry of the old and new diaspora and the Subcontinent. The poetry analysis covers the relevance of historical allusions as well as underlying concerns of gender, ethnicity and class. Comparisons are offered between poets of different places and time periods, yielding numerous sociopolitical paradigms that surface in the poetry.

This anthology of essays, deliberates chiefly on the notion of locating home through the lens of the mythical idea of Trishanku, implying in-between space and homing, in diaspora women’s narratives, associated with the South Asian region. The idea of in-between space has been used differently in various cultures but gesture prominently on the connotation of ‘hanging’ between worlds. Historically, imperialism and the indentured/ ‘grimit’ system, triggered dispersal of labourers to the various colonies of the British. Of course, this was not the only cause of international migratory processes. The partition of India and Pakistan led to large scale migration. There was Punjabi migration to Canada. Several Indians, particularly the Gujaratis travelled to Africa for business reasons. South Indians travelled to the Gulf for employment. There were migrations to East Asian countries under the kangani system. Again, these were not the only reasons. The process of demographic movement from South Asia, has been complex due to innumerable push-pull factors. The subsequent generations of migrants included the twice, thrice (and likewise) displaced members of the diaspora. Racial denigration and Orientalist perceptions plagued their lives. They belonged to various ethnicities and races, inhabited marginalized spaces and strived to acculturate in the host society. Complete cultural assimilation was not possible, creating layered and hyphenated identities. These intricate social processes resulted in amalgamation and cross-pollination of cultures, inter-racial relationships and hybridization in all terrains of culture—language, music, fashion, cuisine and so on. Situated in this matrix was the notion of Home—a special personal space which an individual could feel as belonging to, very strongly. Nostalgia, loss of home, culture shock and interracial encounters problematized this discernment of belongingness and home. These multifarious themes have been captured by women writers from the South Asian region and this book looks at the various aspects related to negotiating home in their narratives.

This book advances a new concept of the "Asian diaspora" that creates links between Asian American, Asian Canadian, and Asian Australian identities. Drawing from comparable studies of the black diaspora, it traces the histories of colonialism, immigration, and exclusion shared by these three populations. The work of Asian poets in each of these three countries offers a rich terrain for understanding how Asian identities emerge at the intersection of national and transnational flows, with the poets' thematic and formal choices reflecting the varied pressures of social and cultural histories, as well as the influence of Asian writers in other national locations. Diasporic Poetics argues that racialized and nationally bounded "Asian" identities often emerge from transnational political solidarities, from "Third World" struggles against colonialism to the global influence of the American civil rights movement. Indeed, this volume shows that Asian writers disclaim national belonging as often as they claim it, placing Asian diasporic writers at a critical distance from the national spaces within which they write. As the first full-length study to compare Asian American, Asian Canadian, and Asian Australian writers, the book offers the historical and cultural contexts necessary to understand the distinctive development of Asian writing in each country, while also offering close analysis of the work of writers such as Janice Mirikitani, Fred Wah, Ouyang Yu, Myung Mi Kim, and Cathy Park Hong.

South Asian Diaspora Narratives: Roots and Routes, analyses the metaphysical and poetical notions and the processes of 'rooting into a culture' and 'routing out of a culture'. These diasporic narratives are often characterised by bifurcated and dislocated identities that exist in a liminal space, in-between two identities, two cultures, and two histories. Yet, 'home' remains, through acts of imagination, remembering and re-creation, an important reference point. It argues that a clearer notion of politics of location will be required to distinguish the different kinds of 'dislocation' the immigrants suffer, both psychologically and sociologically. This book fills a lacuna in the South Asian Diaspora studies by analysing and calling upon a wide range of works in this field from historical, anthropological, sociological, cultural, and literary studies.

This collection uses a transnational approach to study contemporary English-language poetry composed by poets of South Asian origin. The poetry contains themes, motifs, and critiques of social changes, and the contributors seek to encapsulate the continually changing environments that these contemporary poets write about. The contributors show that English-language poetry in South Asia is hybridized with imagery and figurative language adapted from the vernacular languages of South Asia. The chapters examine women’s issues, concerns of marginalized groups—such as the Dalit community and the people of Northeastern India—, social changes in Sri Lanka, the changing society of Pakistan, and the formation of the identity in the several nation states that resulted from the British colony of India.

The figure of the disaporic or migrant writer has recently come to be seen as the 'Everyman' of the late modern period, a symbol of the global and the local, a cultural traveller who can traverse the national, political and ethnic boundaries of the new millennium. Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain seeks not only to place the individual works of now world famous writers such as VS Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Sam Selvon or Hanif Kureishi within a diverse tradition of im/migrant writing that has evolved in Britain since the Second World War, but also locates their work, as well as many lesser known writers such as Attia Hosain, GV Desani, Aubrey Menen, Ravinder Randhawa and Romesh Gunesekera within a historical, cultural and aesthetic framework which has its roots prior to postwar migrations and derives from long established indigenous traditions as well as colonial and post-colonial visions of 'home' and 'abroad'. Close critical readings combine with a historical and theoretical overview in this first book to chart the crucial role played by writers of South Asian origin in the belated acceptance of a literary poetics of black and Asian writing in Britain today.

Contributed articles.