South Asian Diasporas and (Imaginary) Homelands

South Asian Diasporas and (Imaginary) Homelands
Author: Clelia Clini
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2024-11-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1040255280

This edited volume looks at the ways in which films, literature, photography and social media construct images of homelands and diasporas as well as the ways in which they facilitate exchanges between them. The volume presents with a dialogue between these representations and analyses how they are constructed, disseminated, appropriated and/or challenged in relation to recent political developments in South Asia and in the diaspora. Focusing on images and narratives about South Asia and its diaspora, the book aims to re-centre the political nature of representations, as it addresses the interplay between representation, imagination and identity, with a specific focus on the South Asian diasporic experience. This book will interest students and scholars of media, communication, popular culture, cultural studies, Asian studies, politics and sociology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asian Diaspora.

Imaginary Homelands

Imaginary Homelands
Author: Salman Rushdie
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 449
Release: 1992-05-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0140140360

“Read every page of this book; better still, re-read them. The invocation means no hardship, since every true reader must surely be captivated by Rushdie’s masterful invention and ease, the flow of wit and insight and passion. How literature of the highest order can serve the interests of our common humanity is freshly illustrated here: a defence of his past, a promise for the future, and a surrender to nobody or nothing whatever except his own all-powerful imagination.”-Michael Foot, Observer Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands is an important record of one writer’s intellectual and personal odyssey. The seventy essays collected here, written over the last ten years, cover an astonishing range of subjects –the literature of the received masters and of Rushdie’s contemporaries; the politics of colonialism and the ironies of culture; film, politicians, the Labour Party, religious fundamentalism in America, racial prejudice; and the preciousness of the imagination and of free expression. For this paperback edition, the author has written a new essay to mark the third anniversary of the fatwa.

South Asian Gothic

South Asian Gothic
Author: Katarzyna Ancuta
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2021-11-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 178683801X

This book is the first attempt to theorise South Asian Gothic production as a common cultural landscape, taking into account both the historical perspective and the variety of media texts. The volume consists of fifteen chapters by experts in film, literature and cultural studies of South Asia, representing the diversity of the region and a number of ways in which Gothic manifests in contemporary South Asian cultures. Gothic in South Asia can be read as a distinctive aesthetic, narrative practice, or a process of signification, where conventional Gothic tropes and imagery are assessed anew and global forms are consumed, appropriated, translated, transformed or resisted. The volume investigates South Asian Gothic as a local variety of international Gothic and part of the transnational category of globalgothic, contributing to the ongoing discussion on the need to de-westernise Gothic methodologies and ensure that Gothic scholarship remains relevant in the culturally-diverse modern world.

South Asian Atlantic Literature, 1970-2010

South Asian Atlantic Literature, 1970-2010
Author: Ruth Maxey
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2014-02-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0748653864

Tracing a literary lineage for works from different genres, it identifies key trends in recent South Asian American and British Asian literature by considering the favoured formal and aesthetic modes of major writers and by relating their work to differen

Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature

Narratives of Trauma in South Asian Literature
Author: Goutam Karmakar
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 329
Release: 2022-12-30
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 100082179X

This volume addresses cultural and literary narratives of trauma in South Asian literature. Presenting a novel cross-cultural perspective on trauma theory, the essays within this volume study the divergent cultural responses to trauma and violence in various parts of South Asia, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Afghanistan, which have received little attention in literary writings on trauma in their specific circumstances. Through comprehensive sociocultural understanding of the region, this book creates an approachable space where trauma engages with themes like racial identity, ethnicity, nationality, religious dogma, and cultural environment. With case studies from Kashmir, the 1971 liberation war of Bangladesh, and armed conflict in Nepal and Afghanistan, the volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers of literature, history, politics, conflict studies, and South Asian studies.

Interpreting Homes in South Asian Literature

Interpreting Homes in South Asian Literature
Author: Malashri Lal
Publisher: Pearson Education India
Total Pages: 383
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 813178522X

The search for the location in which the self is ‘at home’ has been one of the primary projects of modern literature all over the world. Interpreting Homes: South Asian Literature attempts to map the narratives of the 'home' in South Asian literature from the advance of modernity on the subcontinent till the present day. It aims to read more than the domestic into representations of the home, to explore not only the geographical, but also the psychological and material connotations of 'home'. Its goal is to disassemble the concept of 'home' in all its incarnations as confinement, as stability, as security, as myth and as desire. The book problematises ‘home’ and its experience in different contexts. It investigates if and how home changes its significations when articulated from different locations, in different languages and by different subjects, paying particular attention to ideological determinants like gender and class. The editors of the anthology have encouraged contributors to also address diaspora writing and to achieve the widest possible comparative perspective. Though the focus has been kept on literature, some papers deal with cultural narratives of home in oral and folk mediums. The collection comprises of an Introduction and 18 original essays divided into six thematic sections.

Diaspora and Multiculturalism

Diaspora and Multiculturalism
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 461
Release: 2021-12-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004486534

In postcolonial theory we have now reached a new stage in the succession of key concepts. After the celebrations of hybridity in the work of Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, it is now the concept of diaspora that has sparked animated debates among postcolonial critics. This collection intervenes in the current discussion about the 'new' diaspora by placing the rise of diaspora within the politics of multiculturalism and its supercession by a politics of difference and cultural-rights theory. The essays present recent developments in Jewish negotiations of diasporic tradition and experience, discussing the reinterpretation of concepts of the 'old' diaspora in late twentieth- century British and American Jewish literature. The second part of the volume comprises theoretical and critical essays on the South Asian diaspora and on multicultural settings between Australia, Africa, the Caribbean and North America. The South Asian and Caribbean diasporas are compared to the Jewish prototype and contrasted with the Turkish diaspora in Germany. All essays deal with literary reflections on, and thematizations of, the diasporic predicament.

South Asian Diaspora Narratives

South Asian Diaspora Narratives
Author: Amit Sarwal
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 191
Release: 2017-05-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9811036292

This book analyses the metaphysical and poetical notions and the processes of ‘rooting into a culture’ and ‘routing out of a culture’ in the context of South Asian diaspora in Australia. 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. The author argues that a clearer notion of politics of location is required to distinguish between the different kinds of ‘dislocation’ the immigrants suffer, both psychologically and sociologically. The diaspora is Australia is an under-studied topic, and this book fills a lacuna in 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.

Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain

Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain
Author: Susheila Nasta
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2017-04-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1403932689

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.