Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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Home and Diasporic Imagination: Incorporating Immigrant Writer Chang Shi-Kuo in (Chinese) American Literary Studies
Full text linkAs part of a larger project aiming to include Sinophone US literature in US literary studies, this essay focuses on the Taiwan immigrant writer Chang Shi-Kuo‘s work and his recurrent themes, such as the obsession with China, the anxiety over patrilineal transmission, male hysteria and racial melancholia. The thematic concerns and stylistic experimentalism in Chang‘s fiction intersect with those of other ethnic Chinese writers in the US, whether they write in Chinese or English. Focusing on Chang‘s fiction and its engagement of the diasporic imagination with the aforementioned themes, this paper examines Chang‘s portrayals of US and Taiwan/Chinese societies. While his characters‘ US experience often suggests a critique of technocracy and commercialism, and the ensuing interpersonal alienation in the US, his depiction of Taiwan seems more nuanced and sanguine. I propose to read the discrepancy between such portrayals as resulting more from diasporic nostalgia than from lived experience. Despite Chang‘s explicit attachment to Taiwan, he is also quite aware of his immigrant status. Observing the transition of student immigrants into US citizens, he rejects the label of ―Overseas Student literature; instead, he contends that student immigrant literature will gradually become the literature of the adopted country. Chang‘s affinity with US-born Chinese American writers can be observed in his Chinese protagonists‘ male hysteria, which hints at the dissolution of traditional Chinese gender division in North America. The inability to sustain a traditional Chinese family in North America suggests a failure to ensure a profitable future for the Chinese diaspora, which I describe as anxiety over patrilineal transmission, after the Asian American critic Sau-ling Wong. Such male hysteria not only harks back to the ―obsession with China‖ but also points to an affinitybetween Sinophone US literature and Chinese American literature written in English by US-born Chinese American writers
Ashis Sengupta, ed. Mapping South Asia through Contemporary Theatre: Essays on the Theatres of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka
Full text link“Writing in Search of a Homelandâ€: Re-creating Home in Meena Alexander’s Fault Lines: A Memoir
No full textIn this article I investigate Indian-American author Meena Alexander's autobiographical memoir, Fault Lines (2003). Multiply fragmented by relocations and remembrances, flights and motions, Alexander‟s memoir is relentlessly marked by her ceaseless quest for stability – at home and in exile. As she repeatedly emphasises her irresistible impulse to write since her childhood and particularly to write her self, I will attempt in this article to explore the importance of self-writing in diaspora. Consequently, I will argue that diasporic self-writing not only induces a therapeutic wholeness amidst disjunction and displacement, but also effectively de-creates and re-creates shifting and changing paradigms of the diasporic homes
Displacement of Desire in Kiran Desai’s Inheritance of Loss
Full text linkRobert Frost in “Death of a Hired Man†and Kiran Desai in The Inheritance of Loss expound two contrasting notions of home. While Frost in his poem offers a solid notion of home evoking its physical and emotional aspects, Desai as a migrated Indian novelist talks about the loss of home, making it fluid it in her novel. Desai singles out two characters Jemubhai Propatlal Patel, widely known as the judge, and the poor cook's son Biju, to exemplify this fluid concept of home. They both consider London and New York as cities full of promise and possibility, and wish to leave the homeland, India, to make new homes there. Jemubhai visits London when studying law at Cambridge while Biju goes to New York to make a fortune, during the colonial and the postcolonial eras respectively. Harsh realities do not live up to their expectations. Jemubhai confronts an intolerable existence in the master's land due to his racial, linguistic and biological otherness. On the other hand, Biju suffers from miserable working and living conditions in New York mainly because of his status as an illegal immigrant. Consequently, given the failure of their dreams and desires, they return to their place of origin. On returning, Jemubhai ensconces himself in a cocoon informed by colonial values, recoils from his home as a sordid place and becomes self-consciously an aggressive mimic man. Conversely, Biju comes back enticed by a romantic vision of a homely Kalimpong, only to be robbed of all possessions except the last scrap of cloth on his body. This almost complete physical nudity denudes him mentally as well, bringing forward an upsetting realisation that his fantasy of the homely homeland is illusory, resides only in his mind and has little basis in reality. The paper discusses this home/new home issue with the assumption that both colonial and postcolonial situations can displace the diasporic people‟s desire to be re-rooted, rendering them split and double simultaneously
Politics of In-between Spaces: Diasporic Travails in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction
Full text linkToday's world is more mobile and interconnected than ever before in the history of mankind. Fast–paced communicational advances and technological progress have accelerated the process of shrinking the entire world into a global village. Against the larger multicultural scenario, people of different ethnicities, cultures, religions and races criss-cross, clash and collide with each other. Migration has become the order of the day, and with large-scale intra and inter migratory movements across the globe, the concept of home acquires newer dimensions. The postcolonial era has witnessed the production of a number of literary texts by diasporic writers which aim at recreating. “Indias of the mind.†South Asian diasporic literature is an effective documentation of the cultural and diasporic experience of the immigrants who are torn between the exigencies of self recognition in a hostile land and the loyalty towards ethno-religious traditions of the homeland. The pervasive trope of displacement found in these works focuses on the constantly changing nature of diasporic identities. This article proposes to undertake a postcolonial reading of Jhumpa Lahiri as a diasporic writer with special reference to her novels. In her novels, one finds the search for self-identity by characters who reflect the mood and sensibility of the Indians who migrate to the West in search of newer pastures, but in due course are forced to succumb to the tense forces of cross-cult
