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Fashion, Dress and Identity in South Asian Diaspora Narratives

Author: Noemí Pereira-Ares

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-11-30

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 3319613979

This book is the first book-length study to explore the sartorial politics of identity in the literature of the South Asian diaspora in Britain. Using fashion and dress as the main focus of analysis, and linking them with a myriad of identity concerns, the book takes the reader on a journey from the eighteenth century to the new millennium, from early travel account by South Asian writers to contemporary British-Asian fictions. Besides sartorial readings of other key authors and texts, the book provides an in-depth exploration of Kamala Markandaya’s The Nowhere Man (1972), Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), Meera Syal’s Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (1999) and Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003).This work examines what an analysis of dress contributes to the interpretation of the featured texts, their contexts and identity politics, but it also considers what literature has added to past and present discussions on the South Asian dressed body in Br itain. Endowed with an interdisciplinary emphasis, the book is of interest to students and academics in a variety of fields, including literary criticism, socio-cultural studies and fashion theory.

Diasporic Inquiries into South Asian Women’s Narratives

Author: Shilpa Daithota Bhat

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-02-28

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 1498591779

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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.

Labels and Locations

Author: Louise Lightfoot

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2015-02-27

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 1443875821

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Some happy occasions, like the 1995 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book to Bangladeshi-Australian author Adib Khan, the 2008 Man Booker Prize to Indian born Australian writer Arvinda Adiga, and the 2013 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction to Sri Lankan-Australian author Michele de Krester, have boosted the self-confidence of South Asian-Australian writers in Australia. South Asian diasporic communities have also been the focus for relatively small, but constantly growing, studies by anthropologists and sociologists on the interrelation of gender, race, ethnicity and migration in Australia. The terms Labels and Locations capture numerous aspects that contribute in the making of a diasporic consciousness. This book critically examines the issues of identity, gender, family, class and caste, expressed in the short narratives of South Asian diaspora writers based in Australia. Taking an interdisciplinary approach – from literary, cultural, historical, anthropological, and sociological studies – this book engages chiefly with the oeuvre of postcolonial writers and academics, namely: Mena Abdullah, Adib Khan, Yasmine Gooneratne, Michelle De Kretser, Chandani Lokugé, Chitra Fernando, Satendra Nandan, Suneeta Peres da Costa, Hanifa Deen, Christopher Cyrill, Suvendrini Perera, Sunil Govinnage, Brij V. Lal, Sunil Badami, Glenn D’Cruz, Chris Raja, Manik Datar, David De Vos, Rashmere Bhatti, Kirpal Singh Chauli, Sujhatha Fernandes, Neelam Maharaj, Sushie Narayan, Madu Pasipanodya, Shrishti Sharma, Beryl T. Mitchell, and Sunitha. This book will, by calling upon the works of this much-neglected South Asian diaspora group, fill a lacuna in the broader critical rubric of diaspora studies.

Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women's Fiction

Author: Ruvani Ranasinha

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2016-05-28

Total Pages: 275

ISBN-13: 1137403055

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This book is the first comparative analysis of a new generation of diasporic Anglophone South Asian women novelists including Kiran Desai, Tahmima Anam, Monica Ali, Kamila Shamsie and Jhumpa Lahiri from a feminist perspective. It charts the significant changes these writers have produced in postcolonial and contemporary women’s fiction since the late 1990s. Paying careful attention to the authors’ distinct subcontinental backgrounds of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka – as well as India - this study destabilises the central place given to fiction focused on India. It broadens the customary focus on diasporic writers’ metropolitan contexts, illuminates how these transnational, female-authored literary texts challenge national assumptions and considers the ways in which this new configuration of transnational, feminist writers produces a postcolonial feminist discourse, which differs from Anglo-American feminism.

The South Asian Diaspora

Author: Rajesh Rai

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2008-07-25

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 1134105959

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This book uses the concept of transnational networks as a way to understand the South Asian diaspora. Offering a unique and original insight into the South Asian diaspora, this book will be of interest to academics working in the fields of South Asian studies, diaspora and cultural studies, anthropology, transnationalism and globalization.

Writing Imagined Diasporas

Author: Joel Kuortti

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-05-05

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 1443810177

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Joel Kuortti’s Writing Imagined Diasporas: South Asian Women Reshaping North American Identity is a study of diasporic South Asian women writers. It argues that the diasporic South Asians are not merely assimilating to their host cultures but they are also actively reshaping them through their own, new voices bringing new definitions of identity. As diaspora does not emerge as a mere sociological fact but it becomes what it is because it is said to be what it is, the writings of imagined diasporas challenge “national” discourses. Diaspora brings to mind various contested ideas and images. It can be a positive site for the affirmation of an identity, or, conversely, a negative site of fears of losing that identity. Diaspora signals an engagement with a matrix of diversity: of cultures, languages, histories, people, places, times. What distinguishes diaspora from some other types of travel is its centripetal dimension. It does not only mean that people are dispersed in different places but that they congregate in other places, forming new communities. In such gatherings, new allegiances are forged that supplant earlier commitments. New imagined communities arise that not simply substitute old ones but form a hybrid space in-between various identifications. This book looks into the ways in which diasporic Indian literature handles these issues. In the context of diaspora there is an imaginative construction of collective identity in the making, That a given diaspora comes to be seen as a community is the result of a process of imagining, at the same time creating new marginalities, hybridities and dependencies, resulting in multiple marginalizations, hyphenizations and demands for allegiance. The study concentrates on eleven contemporary women writers from the United States and Canada who write on South Asian diasporic experiences. The writers are Ramabai Espinet, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amulya Malladi, Sujata Massey, Bharati Mukherjee, Uma Parameswaran, Kirin Narayan, Anita Rau Badami, Robbie Clipper Sethi, Shauna Singh Baldwin, and Vineeta Vijayaraghavan.

Diaspora Poetics and Homing in South Asian Women's Writing

Author: Shilpa Daithota Bhat

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2018-03-14

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 1498577636

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This anthology of essays, deliberates chiefly on the notion of locating home through the lens of the mythical idea of Trishanku, implying in-between space and homing, in diaspora women’s narratives, associated with the South Asian region. The idea of in-between space has been used differently in various cultures but gesture prominently on the connotation of ‘hanging’ between worlds. Historically, imperialism and the indentured/ ‘grimit’ system, triggered dispersal of labourers to the various colonies of the British. Of course, this was not the only cause of international migratory processes. The partition of India and Pakistan led to large scale migration. There was Punjabi migration to Canada. Several Indians, particularly the Gujaratis travelled to Africa for business reasons. South Indians travelled to the Gulf for employment. There were migrations to East Asian countries under the kangani system. Again, these were not the only reasons. The process of demographic movement from South Asia, has been complex due to innumerable push-pull factors. The subsequent generations of migrants included the twice, thrice (and likewise) displaced members of the diaspora. Racial denigration and Orientalist perceptions plagued their lives. They belonged to various ethnicities and races, inhabited marginalized spaces and strived to acculturate in the host society. Complete cultural assimilation was not possible, creating layered and hyphenated identities. These intricate social processes resulted in amalgamation and cross-pollination of cultures, inter-racial relationships and hybridization in all terrains of culture—language, music, fashion, cuisine and so on. Situated in this matrix was the notion of Home—a special personal space which an individual could feel as belonging to, very strongly. Nostalgia, loss of home, culture shock and interracial encounters problematized this discernment of belongingness and home. These multifarious themes have been captured by women writers from the South Asian region and this book looks at the various aspects related to negotiating home in their narratives.

Impossible Desires

Author: Gayatri Gopinath

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2005-04-19

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 0822386534

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By bringing queer theory to bear on ideas of diaspora, Gayatri Gopinath produces both a more compelling queer theory and a more nuanced understanding of diaspora. Focusing on queer female diasporic subjectivity, Gopinath develops a theory of diaspora apart from the logic of blood, authenticity, and patrilineal descent that she argues invariably forms the core of conventional formulations. She examines South Asian diasporic literature, film, and music in order to suggest alternative ways of conceptualizing community and collectivity across disparate geographic locations. Her agile readings challenge nationalist ideologies by bringing to light that which has been rendered illegible or impossible within diaspora: the impure, inauthentic, and nonreproductive. Gopinath juxtaposes diverse texts to indicate the range of oppositional practices, subjectivities, and visions of collectivity that fall outside not only mainstream narratives of diaspora, colonialism, and nationalism but also most projects of liberal feminism and gay and lesbian politics and theory. She considers British Asian music of the 1990s alongside alternative media and cultural practices. Among the fictional works she discusses are V. S. Naipaul’s classic novel A House for Mr. Biswas, Ismat Chughtai’s short story “The Quilt,” Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy, and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night. Analyzing films including Deepa Mehta’s controversial Fire and Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, she pays particular attention to how South Asian diasporic feminist filmmakers have reworked Bollywood’s strategies of queer representation and to what is lost or gained in this process of translation. Gopinath’s readings are dazzling, and her theoretical framework transformative and far-reaching.

Planting SEADS

Author: Chanida Phaengdara Potter

Publisher: Sead Storytelling

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781732799905

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What are the stories Southeast Asians carry from the Mekong to the Mississippi? In Minnesota's first Southeast Asian-authored anthology of stories, poetry and artwork, the Southeast Asian diaspora storytelling (SEADS) initiative aims to reclaim, honor and amplify the lived experiences of veterans, mothers, activists, scholars and other historically invisible narratives of Hmong, Khmer, Lao and Vi't community members. From childhood sweethearts to memories of the CIA secret armies, to first winters in Minnesota these stories explore long-buried edges of war and grief, memories and the resilience to rebuild and reimagine the lives our elders believe we could have for ourselves. The high costs and the unexpected treasures. These stories leave the reader with a renewed sense of hope and an understanding of the urgency for everyone to learn from our shared history so that future generations do not have to repeat it. SEADS is a collaboration in partnership with The SEAD Project, ManForward, mk nguyen, and Narate Keys. To learn more, visit www.theseadproject.org.