Read more
The South Asian women's diaspora engages in spatio-temporal interactions and power differentials in a variety of narratives, articulating agency, multiplicities of belonging and culturally integrative practices, highlighting homing paradigms. The sense of alienness in a new homeland, rather in worldwide home places, triggers rethinking of diasporic conceptions and epistemes of individual and group histories, personal and collective experiences. Some of the questions that this anthology seeks to consider are: How do women from the South Asian diaspora represent cultural negotiations and alienness of the adopted homeland in various narratives? What are the themes/issues they select to portray their perceptions of foreignness? How do culture, history and politics intervene in their portrayal of lived experiences? How do they locate themselves in the matrix of foreignness and diaspora? The contributors to this anthology examine narratives depicting South Asian women, their complexly positioned voices, gesturing at the proliferating challenges and reflecting the grim realities of a globalized world.
List of contents
Introduction, Shilpa Daithota Bhat
Section 1: Domicile Tropes
Chapter 1: 'You are here, says the arrow': The Body as Home in the Poetry of Moniza Alvi, Setara Pracha
Chapter 2: India, Heat, Dust and Tea?: Alienness and Marketability in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
and Nicole C. Vosseler, Alejandra Moreno-Álvarez
Chapter 3: "[A] girl from the village: totally unspoilt": Nazneen's 'Unhomeliness' in Monica Ali's Brick Lane, Sam Naidu
Section 2: Shifting Domiciles
Chapter 4: Ethnography of a Hyphen? The Gendering of Gen-X Diasporic Agency, Gurbir Singh Jolly
Chapter 5: Migration and Sexuality in S. J. Sindu's Marriage of a Thousand Lies, Maryse Jayasuriya
Chapter 6: Reimagining Reluctance: The South-Asian Diaspora and Global 'Homing' in Mira Nair's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Shuhita Bhattacharjee
Section 3: Domicile Significations
Chapter 7: Negotiating the "Postcolonial Exotic" through Subversive Third-Person Narration
in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, Lara Virginia Kattekola
Chapter 8: Singing the Subaltern Woman: Film, feminism and Qawwali in the South Asian diaspora, Lauren Bettridge
Chapter 9: Song, Narrative, Belonging: The Place of Song in the Oral Histories of Sri Lankan Tamil women in London, Jasmine Hornabrook
Chapter 10: Domesticating the Alien: Culinary references and food rituals in The Song of the Sun God, Shashikala Assella
About the author
Edited by Shilpa Daithota Bhat
Summary
This anthology is an examination of the co-relations of alienness and homing conceptualizations, cultural and discursive practices, represented in South Asian women’s diasporic narratives. The central premise is the context-specific relationships that generate a sense of unbelongingness in transnational configurations.
