Diasporic Imagination Research Articles

“From Standing Rock to Palestine we are United”: diaspora politics, decolonization and the intersectionality of struggles

ABSTRACT This article analyses a form of diasporic activism that breaks the seeming duality between diasporic imaginaries and colonial realities, diasporas and refugees. By focusing on the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) it analyses a diasporic standpoint which is not confined to identity politics, nor to the Palestinian nationalist struggle of territorial liberation, but conceives of Palestine as one of the most visible, present-day materialisations of Western colonial modernity. The condition of this diasporic political subjectivity lies in what we call here an “intersectional ‘space of appearance’”: an affective multi-sited political space that exposes and makes visible the continuum of systems of subjugation and expropriation across liberal democracies and settler-colonial regimes, and the whiteness of mainstream activist spaces. This space encompasses key sites of Black, Indigenous, Arab and Muslim mobilization: from Ferguson to Standing Rock, from the Mexico-US border to Palestine and Palestinian camps, from Tunis to Paris.

Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary, by Nadège T. Clitandre

Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary, by Nadège T. Clitandre

Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre

Reviewed by: Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre Samantha Pinto Nadège T. Clitandre. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. U of Virginia P, 2018. xii + 250 pp. Nadège Clitandre's book, the first full-length, single-author monograph on Edwidge Danticat, stands as both a necessary correction and a harbinger of what such work can do in and for African Diaspora and postcolonial studies. By focusing on Danticat, the prolific Haitian prose author (her impressive oeuvre over 25 years of publication comprises novels, short fiction, children's books, essays, and memoirs), Clitandre thoughtfully takes on questions of nation [End Page 586] and diaspora. She also chooses to make the questions of representing Haitian literature and history, as well as its diaspora, reverberations of feminist inquiries in content and in the form of her critical writing. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary argues that Danticat's work, rather than sitting at a binary break between nation and diaspora, instead reimagines the categories as "relational and mutually constitutive" (3), interacting with each other in "dialogic engagement that necessitates rereading" (6) splits between home/exile and local/global. While other scholars in the field of diaspora studies have theorized diaspora in complex ways related to the material practices of writing, traveling, archiving, and the critic's own work suturing together various national traditions, Clitandre's reworking of diaspora through Danticat, specifically, calls for a capacious understanding of what constitutes both nation and diaspora, recursively bringing the two into constant conceptual interaction while also refusing to dissolve the specificity of either. This complex articulation of how diaspora might work through a specific author is, of course, also a rewriting of how we as literary critics engage its theoretical import across our field. Clitandre argues that Danticat's work "retains ideas of origin, wholeness, unity, family ancestry, history, and community to reenact them as 'the stuff' of both nation and diaspora but also to disentangle them from ideological frames and totalitarian absolutes that hinder heterogeneous, pluralistic, and liberatory possibilities of imagining the world, our place in it, and our relationship to each other" (25). Clitandre's book is, in the best sense of the word, ambitious; its process of honoring the complexity and breadth of a writer like Danticat refuses to close off paths of interpretation as it builds its own argument about reading Haitian diaspora and indeed global literature in the contemporary moment. Clitandre does this through the trope of "the echo" (26)—a term she identifies with its classical routes as the limited authorized voice of women in Western myth and with historian Joan Scott's more recent formulation of echo as a method of feminist historical inquiry and a way of thinking through how fantasy and silence operate in the archives and in historiographical method for subjects who are not the authors of their own historical record or documentation. For this monograph, Clitandre adapts and merges these critical modes with those of Caribbean theorist Edouard Glissant and black feminist theorist Carol Boyce Davies to define the titular "diasporic imaginary" (2) she represents through Danticat's work. Specifically, she asks, "in what way does the myth of echo tease out certain elements that are critical to the way we read [End Page 587] diaspora as an experience of displacement and to the way we read texts by African diasporic women writers to understand the gendered contours of diaspora?" (7). It is under this question that Clitandre does her most exciting and revealing work. A feminist contouring of diaspora infuses the book, from the first chapter on Danticat's engagement with Haitian history, politics, and diaspora that centers not on correcting historical silences of a masculinist heroic narrative (as one finds in Michel-Rolph Trouillot's critique) but on acknowledging, representing, and echoing the stories and experiences of those who we can't hear, see, or know—especially women. In chapter 2, Clitandre gamely takes on Danticat's writing process as a kind of de-essentialized écriture féminine, one that imagines both diaspora and writing diaspora as an act of feminized labor—riffing on Danticat's own analogy of writing to braiding hair. It is in...

Precarious Passages: The Diasporic Imagination in Contemporary Black Anglophone Fiction, by Tuire Valkeakari

Precarious Passages: The Diasporic Imagination in Contemporary Black Anglophone Fiction, by Tuire Valkeakari

Senegal Abroad: linguistic borders, racial formations, and diasporic imaginaries by Maya Angela Smith Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2019. Pp. 232, $79.95 (hbk).

Senegal Abroad: linguistic borders, racial formations, and diasporic imaginaries by Maya Angela Smith Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2019. Pp. 232, $79.95 (hbk).

Growing up with a long-awaited nation-state: Personal struggles with the homeland among young diasporic Armenians

This paper explores identification with the nation-state as homeland among young diasporic Armenians in France, Russia and the United Kingdom (UK). For dispersed Armenian communities worldwide, the emergence of a fragile nation-state since 1991 has represented a form of collective goal fulfilment accompanied at times by disillusionment in the national myth of the homeland as a place of sanctuary. We argue that the resulting shift in understandings of homeland markedly differentiates the diasporic experiences of Armenians of diverse backgrounds growing up in the post-independence era from those of previous generations. Key to this shift are ambivalent dynamics between memory and myth integral to personal struggles with the homeland. Analysing original interviews with Armenians aged 18 to 35 in three host states, we unpack how memories of contact with the Armenian state accumulated in youth interact with national myths about the homeland in the context of different family migration histories. The active engagement of young people with homeland myths is shown to play an important role in their recollections of first formative visits to Armenia. Through more regular contact with the state, disappointment in elements of politics and culture that clash with personal imaginings of the homeland can lead to ambivalence in identifying with Armenia. Ultimately, the state plays a key orienting role for many young diasporic Armenians, but clashes between recalled encounters and myths concerning the state can render it a place of partial belonging, unable to fulfil the ideals of the diasporic imagination. The findings highlight the value of attending to interaction between memory and myth in diasporic engagement with ‘homeland’ states more broadly.

Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary

Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary

MEDIATING MATONGE: RELOCATIONS OF BELGIAN POSTCOLONIALITY IN FOUR FILMS


 
 
 In this paper I look at the Matonge neighbourhood of Brussels as a locus of postcolonial and diasporic imagination and activism by different groups and individuals most notably people who identify as Africans, Belgians with African roots, or ‘Black’ in Belgium. Within a longer historical narrative that starts in the late 19th century, I focus on the period beginning in the late 1980s when new migrational flows from Africa and other southern countries into Brussels make the Matonge quarter increasingly visible in an otherwise hesitantly globalizing Belgian/European metropolis. This issue is taken up by several filmmakers who, over the last thirty years, have situated their critiques of the Belgian postcolonial condition in ‘Matonge’. In this paper I briefly present four of these films in order to illustrate the ways in which ‘Matonge’ features in changing discourses concerning inequality, cultural affirmation, and diasporic activism.
 KEYWORDS: MATONGE, BRUSSELS, POSTCOLONIAL CONDITION, MEDIA AND MEDIATION
 
 

Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre

Reviewed by: Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre Jana Evans Braziel Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. By Nadège T. Clitandre. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2018. New World Studies. ISBN- 10: 0813941873. 272 pp. US $29.50, paperback. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary, Nadège T. Clitandre's first book, published by the University of Virginia Press in 2018, is a comprehensive analysis of the literary oeuvre of the Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat. Clitandre explores the "tropic permutation[s] of [End Page 290] echo" (5), the Ovidian myth of Echo and Narcissus, and the philosophical reverberations of echo (notably, Édouard Glissant's echo-monde) as a trope for the "doublings" of home and diaspora, local and global, and literary and material registers in Danticat's literary corpus. Situated at the theoretical interstices of globalization, postcolonialism, diasporas, and Black feminist thought, Clitandre's intellectual project foregrounds the geopolitical dimensions of the local and the national (Haiti) to render global insights; in the process, she also meditates on the tenuous and perilous nature of borders; the long-distance tentacles of nations in diaspora; and the literary as a lens into material and political, indeed arduous realities. As an extended case study that proffers global lessons, Clitandre writes, Danticat's "reconstitution of nation through a diasporic imaginary" (3) allows her readers to discern and reimagine the complicated and deterritorialized terrains of diasporas, the transnational engagements with home and homeland, the interstitial border zones across geopolitical boundaries, and the fractured and fragmented lenses wrought by the multifarious fissures of globalization, international migration, landlocked fixity, impoverished immobility, and the hard lived realities of neoliberal economics. Of note is the book's appendix, a dialogic conversation, as Clitandre closes her brilliant first book with an interview with Danticat herself. The discussion moves across a wide range of literary and political issues pertaining to nation and diaspora. Clitandre's and Danticat's voices thus register two voices in this polyphonic community. Given the book's essential and riveting contribution to contextualizing Danticat's work in its multiple connections to feminism, philosophy, politics, psychology, and religion, what follows is a thorough summary and assessment of each part. Clitandre's "Introduction" places Danticat's literary oeuvre in several theoretical contexts—classical myth and literature, Lacanian psychoanalysis, diaspora and diasporic studies, globalization and the global imaginary, Caribbean feminism, and, more broadly, African diasporic feminisms. The introduction painstakingly elucidates for Danticat's readers (and Clitandre's also) key critical terms and conceptual frames that are integral to the latter's reception of the former's literary work. Clitandre carefully overviews scholarly contributions to and theorizations of diaspora and the field of diaspora studies before coining her own critical vocabulary, including concepts like "diasporic imaginary" (constructed from ideas about "diasporic consciousness" and "home spaces"), the "echo," the "echo chamber," and "écho-monde" and "relational poetics" (both of which are directly indebted to the late Édouard Glissant's writings). In doing so, Clitandre reveals a studied relationship to the interdisciplinary fields of diaspora studies and globalization, as well as French structuralism and [End Page 291] poststructuralism and African diasporic feminisms, demonstrating her intimate knowledge of a wide range of critical theorists (Mikhail Bakhtin, Kobena Mercer, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Roland Robertson, Arjun Appadurai, Manfred Steger, Saskia Sassen, Éduardo Galeano, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Benedict Anderson, Charles Taylor, Édouard Glissant, Homi Bhabha, Simon Gikandi, Paul Gilroy, Caren Kaplan, Stuart Hall, Vijay Mishra, Carole Boyce-Davies, bell hooks, Michelle Wallace, Patricia Hill Collins, and James Clifford) as well as literary critics (Anita Mannur, Carine M. Mardorossian, Yanick Lahens, Myriam Chancy, Belinda Edmondson, Barbara Smith) and creative writers (Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker). Chapter 1, "Recall: The Echo Effect of Historical Silences," centers on history and historical echoes of nation and national narratives as recalled in diasporic locations, notably the United States but also the Bahamas, Canada, and other parts of the Caribbean archipelago. As Clitandre powerfully and palpably demonstrates, an understanding of Danticat's literary corpus is not possible without an understanding of her diasporic imaginary and the national, historical narratives that are inextricable from her literary texts. Chapter...

“Locating Shirley Geok-lin Lim: An Interview by Nina Morgan”

Author(s): Morgan, Nina | Abstract: Excerpt from Asian American Writing: The Diasporic Imagination, Vol. 1 Interviews and Essays, edited by Somdatta Mandal

Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre

Reviewed by: Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre Patti M. Marxsen Clitandre, Nadège T. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. UP of Virginia, 2018. ISBN 978-0-8139-4187-5. Pp. xx + 249. It is rare for an entire book of literary criticism to be devoted to a Haitian writer. In her deeply nuanced study, Clitandre adopts an approach that resembles literary biography, although her theoretical concerns release the apparent subject, Danticat, from the role of central character and authorial anchor. Rather, the true subject emerges as countless other subjectivities, voices masked by simplistic categories or lost in collective cultural identities. In defiance of such erasure, Clitandre's project zeroes in on the lives of approximately 1 million hyphenated Haitians living outside the "homeland." Her method is clear from the outset—the deconstruction of a unique diasporic consciousness forged by Danticat across two decades of writing that embraces history, displacement, loss, assemblage, and "the everyday lives and narratives of diasporic subjects" (15). Clitandre's close reading of recent memoirs and major novels—Breath, Eyes, Memory, The Dew Breaker, and Farming of Bones—is filtered through the Greek myth of Echo and Narcissus in which the woodland nymph, known for her melodious voice, is silenced by the jealous goddess Juno. This artful deployment of Ovid's voiceless Echo of antiquity is closely linked to Clitandre's argument for Danticat's "feminist revisioning of Haitian history from a diasporic lens" (16). Through a sustained argument, she asserts that "Danticat's fictional texts uncover the silenced, displaced, and disavowed histories of Haitian people in general and Haitian women in particular" (18). This approach necessarily engages the author and reader with significant events of Haitian history as the concept of "Echo chamber" is redefined as a dynamic space that captures unpredictable resonance. From Danticat's first reading of Haitian literature at the Brooklyn Public Library as a young girl in the 1980s, herself part of the Duvalier-driven diaspora, we come to understand her literary sources. We also encounter the meaning of personal "creation myths" in diasporic lives, those interiorized experiences that draw on historical, fragmented, and inherited memory. To this end, and with deliberate emphasis on the Duvalier era and its aftermath (1957–87), Clitandre convenes a conversation among historians, literary critics, writers, psychoanalytic theorists, and contemporary scholars to address the problem of memory in societies marked by violence, censorship, and silence. Indeed, [End Page 190] in Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (2010), Danticat acknowledges that"Grappling with memory is, I believe, one of many complicated Haitian obsessions" (34). Memory also emerges full-force in her "family memoir" Brother, I'm Dying (2007) focused on the"separate but intertwined lives"of her father and uncle, a Baptist pastor who died in a Miami detention center in 2007 (169). Given its vast terrain and articulate interpretation of a major literary voice, Clitandre's book is highly original and establishes a fresh model of scholarship in the still unexcavated silences of Haitian literature. Patti M. Marxsen Independent Scholar Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French

Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre

Reviewed by: Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary by Nadège T. Clitandre Carine Mardorossian CLITANDRE, NADÈGE T. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2018. 272 pp. $65.00 hardcover; $65.00 e-book; $29.50 paper. Edwidge Danticat is one of the most important Caribbean authors writing in the diaspora today. Her entire body of work may be summarized as a response to the displacement she experienced first after her parents left her behind with her aunt to immigrate to the US, and secondly after she herself left to join them at twelve years of age. Haiti may be the country where she first felt orphaned, but the United States is the place where she truly experienced transplantation after leaving the only home she had ever known. Danticat has since remarked that it was only through and in her encounter with the English language that she felt like she was home again. Language was the space she could enter, engage, learn with, use, and manipulate without judgment or fear of reprisal. It is the tool through which she could fashion her own identity, represent and move beyond the many traumas of her life. It was home. Nadège T. Clitandre’s new book on Danticat beautifully renders this transnational and prolific author’s complex negotiation of the diasporic consciousness and its multilayered relation to the nation of origin. Edwidge Danticat: The Haitian Diasporic Imaginary is a much-needed critical analysis not only because it offers the first sustained monograph about the works of this celebrated author, but also because it successfully recalibrates our understanding of diaspora in postcolonial studies. Indeed, over the last few decades, postcolonial studies has moved from nation to diaspora as a key concept, with many scholars highlighting the opposition between the two. By contrast, Clitandre emphasizes the dialogic relationship between nation and diaspora in Danticat’s work. Her recasting of diaspora as a more complicated phenomenon than what has been theorized under the aegis of “transnationalism” is lucidly articulated, but it is also evocatively and lyrically rendered through the trope of the “echo.” Clitandre shows that the echo effect and its reverberation in any diasporic context may truly be the only appropriate way in which the silenced histories of post-slavery migration and transplantation can actually be represented; that is, through the resonances and traces left by often undocumented and inaccessible wounds whose effects remain as pervasive today as if we had witnessed them firsthand. These are histories that can only be returned to us in a diffused and indirect way, in echoes rather than through any mimetic representational rhetoric. As Clitandre points out, the diaspora is often configured in Caribbean women’s narratives through strategies and metaphors of doubleness, another concept that evokes the repetitive quality of the echo. The double, Clitandre rightly points out, is a recurring [End Page 601] trope especially in texts that tackle sexual trauma (as most Caribbean women’s fiction does). As such, it functions both as a coping mechanism and as a narrative strategy, a double-pronged dimension whose rippling repercussions are indeed echo-like. In Chapter One, it is through a review of Haiti’s turbulent history of colonialism and decolonization that the echo takes on an even more resonant valence. Clitandre discusses, for instance, the three waves of Haitian migration to the US and the echoing ways in which they completely transformed the social and relational fabric of the two countries. She also shows how “Danticat’s literary return to a localized, geographically bounded fictional space does not expunge the diasporic and transnational contours of the small village” (31). Considering the realities of diasporic subjects that have and maintain dual relationships and loyalties to multiple places in our era of globalization, this historicized intervention could not be more timely. Also particularly successful is the theoretical discussion that frames the historicized chronicling and close readings that are offered throughout the book. Clitandre does a convincing job of clearly referencing the theoretical paradigms she uses to articulate her reconceptualization of diaspora, nation, identity. For instance, she offers an illuminating distinction between the Fanonian and the Duboisian notions of double consciousness. The...

Student Migrants and the Diasporic Imagination: Educational Migration, Nationhood, and the Making of Indian Diaspora in the United States

The transient nature of educational migration locates Indian student migrants ambivalently in the United States, rendering them illegible as diasporic subjects. However, by historically situating the movements of these students across borders, this essay illuminates how the liminality of student migrants’ positioning made their presence formative to Indian diasporic life. Offering a postcolonial American studies perspective, this essay examines educational migration in two key moments of US immigration history: the exclusionary era of the early twentieth century and the period following the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Attention to these moments reveals how the circulation of student migrants between India and the United States is part of a longer history of colonial, postcolonial, and imperialist investments in education. Indian student migrants were embedded in struggles for global power, with contentions over nationhood and modernity serving as a crucial feature of their entanglements in these struggles. Embodying the possibilities for a future India, these youth carried a particular responsibility to the pursuit of Indian modernity and, as such, shaped the diasporic gaze back to an Indian homeland. Yet, forged through the confluence of race, class, surveillance, and nationalism, Indian student migrants’ negotiations of this sense of responsibility informed their political alignments in unexpected ways at key moments. Centring student migrants as important agents of diaspora-making, this essay examines these negotiations and their place in the production of Indian diasporic imaginaries in the United States.

The Enigma of Identity: A Reading of Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje

In this paper I aim at analysing the composite, postcolonial, multicultural and transnational nature of identity emerging in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost , most prominently in the protagonist Anil Tissera. My work progresses through two distinct stages: in the first part I discuss the quality and inner contradictoriness of this developing form of identity using the tools of postcolonial criticism and diaspora studies , basically focusing my attention on the ways in which Anil’s identity undergoes modifications that may also appear ambiguous during her journey from Sri Lanka to England first and US later. Ideologically, that passage brings her from the periphery to the centre of the postcolonial world. In the second part of this paper I intend to shift my atten- tion on how Anil needs to come to terms with the conflicting issues at the very roots of her identity formation as an expatriate: in this section of my work I will also employ Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience , a fundamental text in trauma studies, in order to explain how the effects of past traumatic experiences are mainly responsible for disorientation and alienation in a diasporic subject. This dilemma becomes particularly manifest in the case of an exile’s home- coming, such as Anil Tissera in Anil’s Ghost . DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-104 Bibliography Bolland, John. 2004. Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost : Civil Wars, Mystics, and Rationalists. Studies in Canadian Literature/Etudes en Litterature Canadienne , 29, 2: 102-121. Brians, Paul. 2003. Modern South Asian Literature in English . Westport: Greenwood. Burton, Antoinette. 2003. Archive of Bones: Anil ’ s Ghost and the Ends of History. Journal of Commonwealth Literature , 38, 1: 39-56. Burrows, Victoria. 2008. The Heterotopic Spaces of Postcolonial Trauma in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost . Studies in the Novel , 40, 1-2: 161-177. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Cook, Victoria. 2005. Exploring Transnational Identities in Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost . Steven Totosy de Zepetnek ed. Comparative Cultural Studies and Michael Ondaatje’s Writing . West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 6-15. Davis, Emily S. 2009. Investigating Truth, History, and Human Rights in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil ’ s Ghost . Nels Pearson & Marc Singer eds. Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World . Farnham: Ashgate, 15-30. Harting, Heike. 2003. Diasporic Cross-Currents in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Anita Rau Badami’s The Hero’s Walk. Studies in Canadian Literature , 28, 1: 44-70. Mowat, Ryan. 2013. An Aesthetics of War: The Postcolonial Ethics of Anil’s Ghost. Journal of Postcolonial Writing , 49, 1: 28-39. Ondaatje, Michael. 2000. Anil’s Ghost. London: Picador. Quayson, Ato. 2013. Postcolonialism and the Diasporic Imaginary. Ato Quayson & Girish Daswani eds. A Companion to Diaspora and Transnationalism . Chichester: Blackwell, 139-159. Safran, William. 1991. Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return. Di- aspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies , 1, 1, Spring 1991: 83-99. Tsuda, Takeyuki. 2013. When the Diaspora Returns Home: Ambivalent Encounters with the Ethnic Homeland. Ato Quayson & Girish Daswani eds. A Companion to Diaspora and Trans- nationalism . Chichester: Blackwell, 172-189.

Mediating Matonge: Relocations of Belgian Postcoloniality in Four Films

In this paper I look at the Matonge neighbourhood of Brussels as a locus of postcolonial and diasporic imagination and activism by different groups and individuals most notably people who identify as Africans, Belgians with African roots, or ‘Black’ in Belgium. Within a longer historical narrative that starts in the late 19th century, I focus on the period beginning in the late 1980s when new migrational flows from Africa and other southern countries into Brussels make the Matonge quarter increasingly visible in an otherwise hesitantly globalizing Belgian/European metropolis. This issue is taken up by several filmmakers who, over the last thirty years, have situated their critiques of the Belgian postcolonial condition in ‘Matonge’. In this paper I briefly present four of these films in order to illustrate the ways in which ‘Matonge’ features in changing discourses concerning inequality, cultural affirmation, and diasporic activism.

Life in the Diaspora:

A tale about duty and desire, conflict and reconciliation in the lives of the diaspora, is molded in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices. The present paper demonstrates the unevenness in the diasporic life showing the difficulty of the diasporic community, in a cross-cultural ambience, to reconcile with the conflicting entities of their life. Divakaruni epitomizes the spices, appearing emblematic throughout the novel, as the treasure of India, “a mythic place of desire in the diasporic imagination.” This research focuses on how the author depicts an altruistic character like Tilo, who struggles to harmonize herself with the shifting priorities of her life. Her ambivalent soul sways between her egalitarian sense of duty and bodily desire for love. In the midst of turmoil, Tilo settles her mind to “acknowledge the suffering” of all, substantiating that “the smell of charred flesh is the same everywhere.” Finally, the paper concludes with showing how pertaining to “a double consciousness,” the characters, negotiating with the nuances of their inheritance, grow up cosmopolitan, that is “vernacular” in nature, allowing “the local, parochial, rooted, culturally specific” one to live together with the one who is “transnational” and “transcendent.”

South Indian singing, digital dissemination and belonging in London’s Tamil diaspora

Abstract This article explores the digital dissemination of Carnatic – South Indian classical – and Tamil devotional songs, singing and learning in London’s Tamil diaspora. Carnatic and Tamil devotional singing are key cultural practices in this highly dispersed, or ‘scattered’, diaspora, and are strong markers of collective Tamil cultural identity. The voice embodies the distinct South Indian style and is, therefore, highly iconic in South India, Sri Lanka and their diasporas. To demonstrate how the voice and singing are experienced in multiple locations, the article describes specific examples of how ‘traditional’ vocal practices are disseminated through the Internet. These examples are Skype lessons and online broadcasting of Tamil devotional singing. Through engaging in traditional singing practices in online environments, it is argued that vocal practices are central to a sense of belonging in multiple diasporic localities and to musical, spiritual and cultural diasporic imaginaries.

Gary Pak’s A Ricepaper Airplane: Memories of Mountains in the Korean Diasporic Imagination

Gary Pak’s A Ricepaper Airplane: Memories of Mountains in the Korean Diasporic Imagination

Reduced to Rubbish: Trauma and Migrant Identities in Cristina Ali Farah's Little Mother

ABSTRACTCristina Ali Farah's Little Mother is a fictional depiction of the lives of the Somali immigrant community displaced by civil war following the ousting from power of President Mohamed Siad Barre in Somalia in 1991. Drawing on key debates on literary representations of dislocation, this article considers Ali Farah's diasporic imagination as presenting the reader with a scenario where Somali immigrants fail to identify themselves with Somalia as a place they can call home. Instead, they strive to reinvent themselves as “a country in exile”. I read Ali Farah's narrative as particularly effective in creating words and images that convey the wounds borne by Somalis as they leave their natal home, and as they try to make sense of their interstitial selves in Europe and North America. These wounds are both physical and psychological, and lead to the alienation and traumatisation of the dispossessed bodies. I reference Homi Bhabha's concept of “DissemiNation” to explore how the trope of the scattering and gathering of Somalis is imagined in Ali Farah's semiautobiographical novel.

Precarious Passages: The Diasporic Imagination in Contemporary Black Anglophone Fiction by Tuire Valkeakari

Reviewed by: Precarious Passages: The Diasporic Imagination in Contemporary Black Anglophone Fiction by Tuire Valkeakari Toya Mary Okonkwo VALKEAKARI, TUIRE. Precarious Passages: The Diasporic Imagination in Contemporary Black Anglophone Fiction. Gainesville: University of Florida, 2017. 332pp. $84.95 hardcover. Tuire Valkeakari’s Precarious Passages provides a compelling and generative source for scholars and students of myriad fields, as she finds a way to speak beyond the usual constraints of national identity and periodization. To speak to the ongoing “representations of black diasporic identity formation” (viii), Valkeakari brings black diaspora and Anglophone literatures into conversation with each other through connected histories that ultimately begin with the Middle Passage. Her extensive treatment of the primary novels benefits through thoughtful contributions from critical race, Atlantic, gender, trauma, and memory studies. As no universal consensus on the definition of “diaspora” exists, Valkeakari preempts possible confusion and gives several definitions of the term and other concepts throughout her book. Contemporary black diasporas, while not all originating with the Middle Passage, are connected through racism within the Anglophone worlds of the Americas, the Caribbean, and Great Britain. Valkeakari makes four overarching claims with this book: first, through their fictive works, Charles Johnson, Lawrence Hill, Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips, George Lamming, Andrea Levy, Cecil Foster, and Edwidge Danticat have actually influenced the shaping of transnational black diasporic identity; second, by representing slavery and colonial modernity, these novelists examine the oppressive legacy of those institutions on the black diaspora; third, black displacement can be excavated from unexpected experiences, and a twofold focus on depictions of dislocation and representations of diaspora is important to understanding the complexities of “transnationalism, national identity, and other modes of belonging” (6); fourth, though fictive, these novels represent a “‘diasporic double consciousness,’” and the characters are often “caught, legally or emotionally, in no-man’s land between diasporic identification and national identity” (7). Through impeccably detailed analysis, Valkeakari addresses “eleven historically informed novels written by eight contemporary novelists of African or African [End Page 575] Caribbean descent” (2) to showcase the varying outcomes of migration on the black diaspora. Thus, the Middle Passage and slavery, along with concepts of ur-trauma, home, belonging, and unbelonging for black bodies take a central position in the five chapters. These chapters are organized by the chronology of the novels’ settings, and Valkeakari includes close readings of the novels that support the argument that she has established at the beginning of each chapter. Most useful are the chapter conclusions, where she gives a summary of that chapter’s contribution to her overall argument and connects it with the ensuing chapter’s arguments and themes. Homing in on the existential journey of Rutherford Calhoun in Middle Passage by Charles Johnson, chapter one “laments the suffering that the Atlantic slave trade inflicted on its victims” (60). The most compelling argument of this chapter is the reading of a “Buddhist storyline” (44) into Calhoun’s journey, and Valkeakari proves that Johnson was interested in the “Eastern philosophical perspective on possessions” that “effectively displaces the slaveholding United States’ understanding of ownership” (45). By doing a close reading of Middle Passage in connection to Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Valkeakari offers robust counters to the notion of blackness as static and unmalleable. Chapter two examines Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes and the power of narrating “black diasporic subjectivity into being” (98). Hill’s book is situated in a more traditional historical context than the philosophical Middle Passage. The voluntary and forced travels of Aminata showcase the constant movement and reconfiguration of black diaspora identity through a female character who possesses remarkable intelligence, a notion of returning “home,” an unexpected sense of agency, and resourcefulness in spite of ongoing sufferings. Aminata’s experience as a Muslim slave who makes the Middle Passage to the United States, joins the Black Loyalists in the Revolutionary War period, and is relocated to Nova Scotia before going back to the African continent to settle Freetown in Sierra Leone demonstrates the copious integration of non-fiction research into this story. By exposing these forgotten black peoples, whose individual identities have become lost, through Aminata’s story Hill “highlights the link between black diaspora memory and identity” (31...