Title: Fictionalizing South Asian Diasporic Homemaking
Abstract: FOR MANY YEARS NOW, the idea of national literature has been challenged by writers and critics alike around the world. What is at stake is a shift in perception from a mainly nation-based literary universe to a more multicultural one. In this context it is commonplace to label writers with a migratory background as migrant writers; this implies a strong sense of impermanence,as if migrant writers had no proper place [...]; it also invites a treatment of the literature in terms of an applied but thoroughly unprofessional sociology, as the distillation of a homogenized 'migrant situation' in which one writer's experience, transparently mirrored in his/ her writing, is made to stand in metonymically for all.1Graham Huggan's critique here alludes to the fact that labelling produces and implements meaning outside the discursive reality of texts. Clearly, the category of migrant literature is misleading especially when it is used to address literary works by writers of the second or even third generation. Such labelling practices limit authors when they seek to situate themselves. It is against this backdrop that, like Huggan, an increasing number of critics dealing with postcolonial and transcultural studies inquire whether the disciplines' methodologies are sensitive enough to describe the cross-cultural qualities of texts and the circulation of cultures beneath and beyond the level of the nation.2 Focusing on conditions of globalized modernity and transcultural literary practices, literary postcolonialism has become increasingly interdisciplinary.3 While this re-definition has indeed greatly changed the discipline, it is surprising that the increased critical interest in a transnational turn goes hand in hand with the fading of multiculturalism from public discourse in countries such as German, the UK or Australia.4 While national literary arenas are increasingly admitting cross-cultural voices, this also triggers reactions which relentlessly play up possible threats to national mainstream culture and literature. This development is neither unique to a region nor restricted to a single national literary framework. It is, rather, an increasingly global tendency, with different discourses taking diverse forms and styles.5 South Asian diasporic writing has certainly left its imprint on British and American literature, and it has also changed the textual territories of other national literatures such as those of South Africa, Australia, and Canada.6 This process of transformation, however, has always involved personal experiences which may range from a sense of dislocation to the embrace of a new life-world. Homi Bhabha refers as follows to this emotional and physical in-between position:In the house of fiction you can hear, today, the deep stirring of the unhomely. You must permit me this awkward word - - because it captures something of the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world in an unhallowed place. To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the unhomely be easily accommodated in that familiar division of the social life into private and public spheres. The unhomely moment creeps up on you as stealthily as your own shadow, and suddenly you find yourself [. . . ] taking the measure of your dwelling in a state of incredulous terror.7All along people developed different strategies to cope with and hopefully overcome the destabilizing condition of the 'unhomely'. Some writers, for example, believe to make home and find a places within these transformative settings by introducing alternative histories through retelling the past from a new vantage point: i.e. including such migratory histories as the Indo-South African Farida Karodia's novel Other Secrets. Yet others choose to evoke alternative realities by inventing Utopian scenarios such as that of the Canadian writer Shani Mootoo in her seminal novel Cereus Blooms at Night. What both creative approaches to home have in common is an urge to generate a space to encounter dislocation and homemaking with greater sensitivity. …
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot