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List of contents
1. Introduction - Imagining Punjab and the Punjabi diaspora: after more than a century of Punjabi migration 2. ‘The heart, stomach and backbone of Pakistan': Lahore in novels by Bapsi Sidhwa and Mohsin Hamid 3. Culture shock on Southall Broadway: re-thinking ‘second-generation’ return through ‘geographies of Punjabiness’ 4. Punjabiyat and the music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan 5. Tracing Sufi influence in the works of contemporary Siraiki Poet, Riffat Abbas 6. Exiled in its own land: Diasporification of Punjabi in Punjab 7. (Dis)honourable paradigms: a critical reading of Provoked, Shame and Daughters of Shame
About the author
Anjali Gera Roy is a Professor in the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India. She has published widely on literary, cultural and diaspora studies. Her books include Bhangra Moves: From Ludhiana to London and Beyond (2010), Travels of Bollywood Cinema: From Bombay to LA (2012), Magic of Bollywood: At Home and Abroad (2012) and Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement and Resettlement (2008). Her new book, Cinema of Enchantment will be published in 2015.
Summary
This book moves away from originary myths of region and identity that have dominated academic and mediatized representations of Punjab, a land-locked region divided between India and Pakistan after the Partition of 1947, and instead focuses on the role of the imagination in producing Punjab. It deconstructs Punjab as an ethno-spatial, ethno-linguistic and ethno-cultural construct produced by the communities who dwell there, those who have left it and those formed by new narratives of the region.By isolating imaginings of Punjab that are not centred on exclusivist regional, linguistic, sectarian or caste perspectives, contributions to this book propose the concept of free-flowing cartographies in relation to Punjab, which facilitate its imaginings as a geographical region, a social construct and a state of consciousness. The region is simultaneously imagined as a small place, a neighbourhood, a city, and a village, but also as a performative practice and a certain ways of doing things.
Through focusing on a number of Punjabi spaces and communities and engaging with Punjab as a geographical region, social construct and state of consciousness, the papers in the book hope to contribute to broader debates on transnationalism, postnationalism, micronationalism, and new identity narratives emerging in the twenty first century. This book was originally published as a special issue of South Asian Diaspora.
