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This innovative contribution to understanding the promise and contradictions of contemporary postcolonial culture applies a wide array of theoretical tools to a large body of literature. The author compares the work of established Indian writers including Bharati Mukherjee, Meena Alexander, Sara Suleri, and Sunetra Gupta to new writings by such Afro-Italian immigrant women as Ermina dell’Oro, Maria Abbebù Viarengo, Ribka Sibhatu, and Sirad Hassan. Sandra Ponzanesi’s analysis highlights a set of dissymmetrical relationships that are set in the context of different imperial, linguistic, and market policies. By dealing with issues of representation linked to postcolonial literary genres, to gender and ethnicity questions, and to new cartographies of diaspora, this book imbues the postcolonial debate with a new élan.

Reflecting the continuing interest in diaspora and transnationalism, this collection of critical essays is located at the intersection of gender and diaspora studies, exploring multiple ways in which literature negotiates, interprets and performs gender within established and emerging ethnic spaces. Based on current theories of diaspora, as well as feminist and queer studies, this collection focuses on close textual interpretation framed by cultural and literary theory. Targeted at both the a.

The Indian diaspora is the largest diasporic movement from Asia, with the Indian community numbering over twenty-five million around the world.Its large scale encompasses a kaleidoscopic community from disparate regions, languages, cultural heritages, religions, and traditions within the subcontinent.

While many people see 'home' as the domestic sphere and place of belonging, it is hard to grasp its manifold implications, and even harder to provide a tidy definition of what it is. Over the past century, discussion of home and nation has been a highly complex matter, with broad political ramifications, including the realignment of nation-states and national boundaries. Against this backdrop, this book suggests that 'home' is constructed on the assumption that what it defines is constantly in flux and thus can never capture an objective perspective, an ultimate truth. Along these lines, Unreliable Truths offers a comparative literary approach to the construction of home and concomitant notions of uncertainty and unreliable narration in South Asian diasporic women's literature from the UK, Australia, South Africa, the Caribbean, North America, and Canada. Writers discussed in detail include Feroza Jussawalla, Suneeta Peres da Costa, Meera Syal, Farida Karodia, Shani Mootoo, Shobha Dé, and Oonya Kempadoo. With its focus on transcultural homes, Unreliable Truths goes beyond discussions of diaspora from an established postcolonial point of view and contributes with its investigation of transcultural unreliable narration to the representation of a g/local South Asian diaspora.

This book introduces readers to the many dimensions of historical and contemporary Indian transnationalism and the experiences of migrants and workers to reveal the structures of transnationalism and the ways in which Indian origin groups are affected. The concept of crossing borders emerges as an important theme, along with the interweaving of life in geographic and web spaces. The authors draw from a variety of archives and intellectual perspectives in order to map the narratives of Indian transnationalism and analyse the interplay of culture and structures within transnational contexts. The topics covered range from the history of transnational networks, activism, identity, gender, politics, labour, policy, performance, literature and more. This collection presents a wide array of issues and debates which will reinvigorate discussions about Indian transnationalism. This handbook will be an invaluable resource for academics, researchers and students interested in studying South Asia in general and the Indian diaspora in particular.

With Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India (2017) and Coming Out as Dalit: A Memoir (2019), two auto/biographical narratives by modern, educated, immigrant women, Sujatha Gidla and Yashica Dutt emerge as new voices of Dalit writing in English. This article analyzes the narrative strategies employed by Gidla and Dutt as they tell of their individual lives intertwined with accounts of their families and the histories of their underprivileged communities. It argues that the identities performed in the texts meet the \"horizon of expectations\" of contemporary readers and redirect Dalit discourse.

This article discusses the perpetration of Orientalism in the arena of contemporary South Asian literature in English: no longer an Orientalism propagated by Occidentals, but ironically enough, by Orientals, albeit by diasporic Orientals. This process, which is here termed as Re-Orientalism, dominates and, to a significant extent, distorts the representation of the Orient, seizing voice and platform, and once again consigning the Oriental within the Orient to a position of ‘The Other’. The article begins by analysing and establishing the dominant positionality of diasporic South Asian women writers relative to their non-diasporic counterparts in the genre, particularly within the last half decade. It then identifies three problems with the techniques employed by some diasporic authors which have exacerbated the detrimental effects of Re-Orientalism; the pre-occupation with producing writing which is recognisably within the South Asian genre, the problem of generalisation and totalisation, and the insidious nature of ‘truth claims’.

iiiPunjab, a region divided between India and Pakistan, has witnessed multiple nomadic, mendicant, trading and pastoral mobilities for centuries. Imperial assisted mobilities in the nineteenth century produced a category of hypermobile Sikhs, who left their villages in Punjab to seek their fortunes in Southeast Asia, Africa, Australia, America and Canada. The practices of the British, British Indian and the Canadian governments to obstruct free flows of Sikhs offer telling instances of the exercise of governmentality through which both old imperialism and the new Empire assert their sovereignty. This book focuses on the Komagata Maru episode of 1914: this Japanese ship was chartered by Gurdit Singh, a prosperous Sikh businessman from Malaya. It carried 376 passengers from Punjab and was not permitted to land in Vancouver on grounds of a stipulation about a continuous journey from the port of departure. It was forced to return to Kolkata, where the passengers were fired at, imprisoned or kept under surveillance. The author isolates juridical procedures, tactics and apparatuses of security through which the British Empire exercised power on imperial subjects to investigate the significance of this incident to colonial and postcolonial migration. Juxtaposing public archives including newspapers, official documents and reports with private archives and interviews of descendants, the book analyses the legalities and machineries of surveillance that regulate the movements of people in the old and new Empire. Addressing contemporary discourse on neoimperialism and resistance, nation, migration, diaspora, multiculturalism and citizenship, this book will be of interest to scholars in the field of diaspora studies, postcolonialism, minority studies, migration and mobility studies, multiculturalism and Sikh/Punjab and South Asian studies.