Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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Indian Diasporic Formations in Guyana: Reading Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture
Full text linkThis paper deals with Gaiutra Bahadur’s recently published non-fiction narrative, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (2013). As a sequel to the end of slavery in the 1830s, the system of indenture, though equally exploitative, served as the source of voluntary migrant labour to manage the plantation economies in far-flung British colonies. In reconstructing the traumatic experience of her great-grandmother as an indentured worker uprooted from her homeland in 1903, Bahadur has meticulously researched archival sources from which we can extrapolate the adaptive persistence of nearly 240,000 Indians who migrated to Guyana between 1838 and 1917 and became the vanguard of the Indian diaspora there.   We propose to discuss the key characteristics of diasporas as well as the typological criteria of existing diaspora models. For this paper we adopt the theoretical conceptualisation of Susan Koshy’s term “neo-diaspora†because it fits well with the Indian case in Guyana. The Indian relation to homeland and myths of return are much more affected by ambiguity and stress than the classical model of diaspora posits. We examine Bahadur’s empirical depiction and gendered articulations of the indentured Indian women, braving brutalities and, at the same time, recreating a cultural dynamic in the domestic sphere as well as shaping an incipient home in an alien regime. The paper will also probe the culturally reflexive data excavated by Bahadur to postulate that the Indian female immigrants, despite remaining fettered and embattled, contributed to family making and negotiated creolised change for cultural reproduction conducive to a distinct diasporic formation
Angshuman Kar, ed. Contemporary Indian Diaspora: Literary and Cultural Representations
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Spatial Visions: Mobility and the Social Order in Pakistani Women’s English-Language Partition Fiction
Full text linkTwo fictions by Pakistani women about the “long partition,†a concept introduced by Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar to refer to the temporally expansive “postcolonial burden of [the] political partition†of the subcontinent (3), provide unique insights into a vision of emplaced citizenship from a non-Muslim minority perspective. Bapsi Sidhwa’s 1991 novel Cracking India, for instance, offers readers an opportunity to understand territories as spaces created through mobility of and interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims during the partition era. The novel’s historical focus brings forth questions about how places and groups affected and were affected by the British withdrawal from the subcontinent, the violence that ensued, and the efforts to (re-) constitute place and peoples – or, a social order – that occurred subsequently. Similarly, Maniza Naqvi’s 2008 novel A Matter of Detail features toothless efforts to reclaim place through mobility so as to reanimate a belonging changed or hidden in the aftermath of partition and the development of an increasingly religiously intolerant Pakistan. While I make no claim to the unmediated representational abilities of partition fiction, I do contend that novels like Sidhwa’s and Naqvi’s grant imaginative insights into lived experiences and possibilities, which, in turn, can motivate alternative social orders. For instance, Cracking India demonstrates the effects of the dissolution of one type of order and the struggles to establish alternatives in the newly created Pakistan. In contrast, A Matter of Detail considers the consequences of the durability of a social order when alternatives fail
“No man is an islandâ€: Crossing Thresholds – Journeying with the Recent Poetry of Syd Harrex
No full textSyd Harrex's poetry has been widely published both overseas and in Australia, and in retirement he continued to write and to be involved in the mentoring of creative writing. He always considered that his professional activities, which had brought him in contact nationally and internationally with contemporary writers, had significantly nourished his own development as a poet.  In 2009, as we were working with Syd to gather poems together for Five Seasons, he experienced the sudden diminution of eyesight, the onset of macular degeneration, and this radically changed the way he was now able to compose. This paper explores the connections between Syd Harrex's recent and earlier poetry, the ways in which his creative process changed with the failing of eyesight, and the impetus to write back to his Tasmanian-islandic self through the memories of childhood, as prompted by the melodies and rhythms of everyday life
Forging Transnational Identities: A Postethnic Diasporic Re-imaging of “Home†in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake
Full text linkBenedict Anderson's definition of nation as “an imagined political community†(6) is important in the context of the portrayal of home by diasporic writers. “Home,†when re-calling or re-imaging the quest for belonging from the point of view of the diaspora, is often portrayed as an elusive metaphoric vision that is in resonance with the struggle against the attempt to pin the term down to physical dimensions.  This paper explores the concept of “home†in terms of its changing connotations in the diasporic writing of Asian American author Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri's 2003 novel, The Namesake, portrays the diasporic conflict between an essentialist Indian identity and assimilating into America's multicultural ethos. This conflict is more pronounced in the case of the female characters, portrayed through attempts at juxtaposing traditional expectations and complete assimilation. Home becomes a “presence in absence†for the female characters in Lahiri's novel, challenging the idea of an identity based on the nation as a fixed, geographical entity, and the culinary becomes the site for cultural negotiation. This paper seeks to delineate how conflicting identities make Vijay Mishra's concept of the diasporic “impossible mourning†(9) a ground to forge a new identity based on the concept of a postethnic transnational diasporic space
The Dark Side of Society in Two Malaysian Short Stories: A Grotesque Reading
Full text linkThis paper operates on the notion of the unintentional grotesque and aims to explore elements of the grotesque in Lee Kok Liang's “Just a Girl†(1968) and Lisa Ho King Li's “The Tiger and the Moth†(1991). A grotesque reading of the two works was done based on several reasons: the misfit characters, the grotesque elements present in the stories and ultimately, the grotesque manipulation of power towards the Other in society. This article aims to analyse elements of grotesque in the two stories via its thematisation of notions of alterity and manipulation of power. I also argue that the grotesque elements serve as a critique of the social malaise portrayed in the stories. Lisa Ho's misfit is the effeminate Endi, an illegitimate child of mixed parentage with mottephobia whose status as the other leads to a grotesque death. The misfit in Lee's work is portrayed via the nameless blind girl facing a bleak future as a result of her blindness and her father's abuse of paternal authority. While both protagonists are polar opposites, they both face grotesque consequences because of who they are. By relating to this, this paper argues that the grotesque elements expose readers to the unexpected, dark side of society
