The Diaspora Writes Home

This book by eminent author Jasbir Jain explores the many ways the diaspora remembers and reflects upon the lost homeland, and their relationship with their own ancestry, history of the homeland, culture and the current political conflicts. Amongst the questions this book asks is, ‘how does the diaspora relate to their home, and what is the homeland's relationship to the diaspora as representatives of the contemporary homeland in another country?’. The last is an interesting point of discussion since the 'present' of the homeland and of the diaspora cannot be equated. The transformations that new locations have brought about as migrants have travelled through time and interacted with the politics of their settled lands---Africa, Fiji, the Caribbean Islands, the UK, the US, Canada, as well as the countries created out of British India, such as Pakistan and Bangladesh---have altered their affiliations and perspectives. This book gathers multiple dispersions of emigrant writers and artistes from South Asia across time and space to the various homelands they relate to now. The word ‘write’ is used in its multiplicity to refer to creative expression, as an inscription, as connectivity, and remembrance. Writing is also a representation and carries its own baggage of poetics and aesthetics, categories which need to be problematised vis-à-vis the writer and his/her emotional location.

This book explores language maintenance and development in the linguistic lives of second-, third-, and fourth-generation immigrants as they navigate migration and diaspora, highlighting the role of women in acting as custodians and gate-keepers of family languages towards creating a sense of home. The volume features an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on work from narrative, storytelling, literary studies, and linguistic anthropology, as well as interviews with multiple generations of immigrant families, to reflect on the ways these families foster a sense of home and maintain connections to their homelands through language. Robinson showcases the voices of a diverse range of families to examine the choices women in immigrant families make between the use of family languages, dominant community languages, or a mix of the two. The volume enhances our understanding of the ways in which immigrants navigate the linguistic landscapes of home and community amid migration and diaspora. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, language and gender, and language and migration.

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.

In At Home in Diaspora, Wendy W. Walters investigates the work of Chester Himes, Michelle Cliff, and other twentieth-century black international writers who have lived in and written from countries they do not call home. Walters suggests that in the absence of a recoverable land of origin, the idea of diaspora comes to represent a home that is not singular or exclusionary.

This book makes a significant addition to the field of literary criticism on African Diaspora literatures. In one volume, it brings together the novels of eight transnational African Diaspora women writers, Yaa Gyasi, Chika Unigwe, Chimamanda Adichie, Imbole Mbue, NoViolet Bulawayo, Aminatta Forna, Taiye Selasi, and Leila Aboulela, and positions them as chroniclers of African immigrant experiences. The book inspires critical readings of these writers’ works by revealing emerging trends in women’s literature as they are being determined and redefined by immigration. As transnational subjects, the writers engage various meanings of mobility and exhibit innovative aesthetic styles; they create awareness on gender identities and transformations, constructions of home and belonging, as well as the politics of citizenship in the hostland. The book also highlights the importance of reverse migrations and performance returns to the homeland as an expression of human desire for home and belonging, and taken as a whole, it enhances our understanding of how migration and transnational existence are (re)shaping immigrant subjects. This book will be of interest to scholars, students, and researchers of African Diaspora literatures and gender studies, who will find this book beneficial for investigating critical trends, approaches to transnational literature, and for comprehending the diasporic burdens that transnational immigrants bear.

Issues of cultural hybridity, diaspora and identity are central to debates on ethnicity and race and, over the past decade, have framed many theoretical debates in sociology, cultural studies and literary studies. However, these ideas are all too often considered at a purely theoretical level. In this book Yasmin Hussain uses these ideas to explore cultural production by British South Asian women including Monica Ali, Meera Syal and Gurinder Chadha. Hussain provides a sociological analysis of the contexts and experiences of the British South Asian community, discussing key concerns that emerge within the work of this new generation of women writers and which express more widespread debates within the community. In particular these authors address issues of individual and group identity and the ways in which these are affected by ethnicity and gender. Hussain argues that in exploring the different dimensions of their cultural heritage, the authors she surveys have created changes within the meaning of the diasporic identity, articulating a challenge to the notion of 'Asianness' as a homogenous and simple category. In her examination of the process through which a hybridized diasporic culture has come into being, she offers an important contribution to some of the key questions in recent sociological and cultural theory.

An exploration of the burgeoning field of Anglophone Asian diaspora poetry, this book draws on the thematic concerns of Hong Kong, Asian-American and British Asian poets from the wider Chinese or East Asian diasporic culture to offer a transnational understanding of the complex notions of home, displacement and race in a globalised world. Located within current discourse surrounding Asian poetry, postcolonial and migrant writing, and bridging the fields of literary and cultural criticism with author interviews, this book provides close readings on established and emerging Chinese diasporic poets' work by incorporating the writers' own reflections on their craft through interviews with some of those featured. In doing so, Jennifer Wong explores the usefulness and limitations of existing labels and categories in reading the works of selected poets from specific racial, socio-cultural, linguistic environments and gender backgrounds, including Bei Dao, Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin, Hannah Lowe and Sarah Howe, Nina Mingya Powles and Mary Jean Chan. Incorporating scholarship from both the East and the West, Wong demonstrates how these poets' experimentation with poetic language and forms serve to challenge the changing notions of homeland, family, history and identity, offering new evaluations of contemporary diasporic voices.

During the past two decades, at the same time that the South Asian presence in the U.S. and Europe has become an increasingly visible part of mainstream social life and popular culture, scholars of South Asian descent have come to occupy many prominent positions within the Western academy, contributing to the development of disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. In this collection of highly personal essays, leading figures in anthropology, history, and cultural and literary studies reflect on the complex interplay between individual and collective trajectories, examining their own experiences as students, scholars, and teachers. Their narratives trace the arc of interactions between East and West from the late colonial period, through Indian Independence, the Cold War, the radicalism of the 1960s, and the development of subaltern and postcolonial studies, to the current conjuncture. Throughout, these writers explore the past and future significance of area studies as a paradigm for education and scholarship. Contributors are Shahid Amin, Arjun Appadurai, Urvashi Butalia, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee, Vasudha Dalmia, Prasenjit Duara, Ramachandra Guha, Akhil Gupta, Sudipta Kaviraj, Purnima Mankekar, Gyan Prakash, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam.