Queering the Colonial in Shyam Selvadurai’s Swimming in the Monsoon Sea

Abstract

In my paper “Queering the Colonial” I will analyze Sri-Lankan-Canadian novelist Shyam Selvadurai’s novel Swimming in the Monsoon Sea (2005) to facilitate a discussion where a diasporic heterosexual intervention enables South Asian queer discursive spaces initiate new alliances with heteronormativity that blur the boundaries between homosexuality/heterosexuality. Further, my study will help reflect on how a return to pre-colonial South Asian architecture – an amalgamation of styles from Greece, Afghanistan, and India – can expand the idea of a global South Asia across time and space. In my article I will show that the colonial silencing of a two-thousand-year-old civilization was never complete; it is only through a strategic negotiation with a pre-colonial past that postcolonial South Asia can initiate non-reductive non-western epistemologies of understanding South Asian queer and female. While examining how South Asian homosociality complicates western attitudes toward queerness, I will also extend the conversation to show a shift in power when teenage Amrith de-centers Othello and defies traditional portrayal of women, for instance, of a passive Desdemona. Drawing on South Asian feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories, the paper will negotiate across different borders, critique extant colonial ideologies, and open up new interpretive frameworks of understanding postcolonial South Asian literature.