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Adopting the concept of diaspora--literally dispersal, or the scattering of a people--to the historical and contemporary presence of people of Indian subcontinental origin in other areas of the world, Emmanuel Nelson uses this paradigm to analyze Indian expatriate writing. In Reworlding, Nelson has commissioned fourteen critical essays by as many scholars to examine major areas of the diaspora--among them Britain, the United States, Canada, Trinidad, Fiji, Singapore, East and South Africa--and prominent literary figures, including Salman Rushdie, V. S. Naipaul, Kamala Markandaya, Bharati Mukherjee, and Raja Rao.
Collectively, the essays demonstrate that the various literary traditions within the Indian diaspora share certain common resonances engendered by historical connections, spiritual affinities, and racial memories. Individually, they provide challenging insights into the particular experiences and writers. At the core of the diasporic writing is the haunting presence of India and the shared anguish of personal loss that generate the aesthetics of reworlding underlying and unifying this body of literature. This collection will be of value to scholars and students of Indian writing in English, postcolonial writing in general, and the literature of exile and immigration.
List of contents
Introduction by Emmanuel S. Nelson
The Girmit Ideology Revisited: Fiji Indian Literature by Vijay Mishra
V. S. Naipaul: History as Cosmic Irony by P. S. Chauhan
Voice in Exile: "Journey" in Raja Rao and V. S. Naipaul by K. Chellappan
South Asia/North America: New Dwellings and the Past by Craig Tapping
Passages from India: Migrating to America in the Fiction of V. S. Naipaul and Bharati Mukherjee by C. L. Chua
"The Sorrows of a Broken Time": Agha Shahid Ali and the Poetry of Loss and Recovery by Lawrence Needham
Still Arriving: The Assimilationist Indo-Caribbean Experience of Marginality by Victor Ramraj
History and Community Involvement in Indo-Fijian and Indo-Trinidadian Writing by Helen Tiffin
Staying Close but Breaking Free: Indian Writers in Singapore by Kirpal Singh
Sam Selvon's Tiger: In Search of Self-Awareness by Harold Barratt
Indian Writing in East and South Africa: Multiple Approaches to Colonialism and Apartheid by Arlene A. Elder
Kamala Markandaya and the Indian Immigrant Experience in Britain by Hena Ahmad
Rushdie's Fiction: The World Beyond the Looking Glass by Vijay Lakshmi
Author(iz)ing Midnight's Children and Shame: Salman Rushdie's Constructions of Authority by Anuradha Dingwaney
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Emmanuel S. Nelson is Professor of English at the State University of New York, College at Cortland. His many books include African American Dramatists: An A-to-Z Guide (2004), African American Authors, 1745-1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (2000), and Contemporary African American Novelists: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook (1999), all available from Greenwood Press.
