Diasporic Theory Research Articles

“Chitthi aayi hai”: Diasporic Sensibilities, Memory and Nostalgia

Nostalgia has been a popular concept deployed to examine diasporic narratives. This paper is an examination of the song “Chitthi aayi hai” (“the letter has come from the homeland”) from the popular film Naam (1986) looking at how nostalgia is constructed and recreated. The song is about ‘a letter from the homeland’ gesturing at pain, memory, what has been lost and what is being achieved in the hostland. Through scholarly references to nostalgia, Bollywood music and diasporic theory, this study focuses on the role and function of nostalgia in Indian diasporic narrative practices.

A More Proximate Form of Theory: Tracing New Interdisciplinary Ground through Discourses of Diaspora and Haptic Aesthetics


 Cultural geographers Nigel Thrift and Stephen Pile have asked, “how is it possible to make sense of our selves, if the boundaries that tell us who ‘we’ are are incoherent, or fragmented, or fuzzy[?]” (1995: 179). One promising answer to this question has been to deconstruct the otherwise stable sense of identity that has marked the body in discourses of culture and transnational geography. The emerging interdisciplinary field of haptics (referring to the study of the sense of touch) offers a new way of investigating the boundaries that mark the body in the contexts of culture and literature, specifically exploring who is touched, who touches, when touch begins, and when it ends, in order to creatively examine boundaries of culture, which although fragmented, shifting, topographically uneven, offer unique and productive ways of re-conceptualizing transnational identity. Tracing the expanding the field of haptics to the discourses of diaspora and cultural studies, this paper will discuss haptic aesthetics in the shifting terrain of cultural studies and diasporic theory, for what this emerging field suggests about the incoherent nature of cultural boundaries and alternative possibilities for transnational community formation.

Postcolonial Studies and the Ethics of the Quarrel

The history of postcolonial studies is a history of quarrels. Since its emergence in the late 1970s in the wake of Edward W. Said's Orientalism (1978), a book with which many have quarrelled due to its daring conjoining of culture with imperialism, the fortunes of postcolonial thought have been shaped by ongoing wrangles between contrary positions. These conceptual quarrels, turning still, include: Marxist versus ‘culturalist’ postcolonialisms; diasporic theory versus nationalism; metropolitan versus ‘third world’; cosmopolitanism versus materialism; cultural studies versus the ‘English department’; anglophone versus ‘native’ languages; poststructuralism versus tricontinentalism; globalization versus planetarity. Acknowledging that postcolonial studies is arguably one of the most critiqued and self-critical theoretical paradigms of recent decades, this essay considers the quarrel not simply as the product of divergent politics but as a crucial element of postcolonialism's ethical modus operandi. It ultimately both establishes the ethical agency of quarrels in postcolonial thought and looks ahead to the latest unfolding of key contentions in an ever-developing field.

Dwelling in Diaspora: Judith Butler’s Post-secular Paradigm

This article aims to present Judith Butler’s theory of diaspora as a theological paradigm for post-secular social existence. Her accounts of dispossession, statelessness, and exilic identity all afford us a normative challenge for how to think politics and the theological together. We begin by framing Judith Butler’s diasporic theory of politics within Adriennes Rich’s poetic perspective on ecstatic identity. We proceed to argue that by emphasizing both the precariousness and interdependency of social life, Rich and Butler’s shared commitments to universalizing queer forms of collective belonging and affective relations offer an alternative post-secular paradigm to that offered so far by theorists such as Charles Taylor or Jürgen Habermas. Achieving a post-secular “state” may ultimately be a matter of embracing the failure of our own representations, particularly the failures of contemporary religion to represent either the divine or the human, or to constitute a society with its own political theology. It is paradoxically this kind of failure that can open us up to look at ourselves, and to focus on the precariousness and vulnerability of human existence that we see with our very eyes and reproduced by our very own hands.

Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico José DavidSaldívar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.

Trans-Americanity: Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico Jose' David Saldi'var. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.A leading figure in the field of Chican@ cultural production, Saldivar's latest monograph offers an inventive model for post-national projects in American Studies. Framed by the work of Anibal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, Saldivar foregrounds the historical role that the Americas played in the construction of colonialism, globalization, modernity, and the capitalist world-system in order explore the concept of Americanity as routed through hemispheric and trans-American approaches cultural studies. His methodology gives rise not only new readings of canonical texts but also traces out the ways in which trans-national post-colonial writers have sought to create an epistemological ground on which coherent versions of the world may be produced (xx).One of the pleasures of Trans-Americanity is that Saldi'var's arguments are typically comprised of novel textual juxtapositions. For example, in the first chapter, he connects border theory the coloniality of power by skillfully linking the linguistic inventiveness of Victor Martinez's Parrot in the Oven together with the minoritized nepantilism of Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera and the challenge South Asian identities in Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. Though Saldivar admits his results are preliminary (1), the articulation of border and diasporic theory constitutes an inventive, groundbreaking critical project, which he develops in a subsequent chapter that relies on Jose' Marti' in order think through how migratory subjects can be conceptualized as hemispherically American. Similarly, chapter three presents a contrapuntal reading of two memoirs that explore the War of 1898 from differing vantage points: Theodore Roosevelt's The Rough Riders and Miguel Barnet's and Esteban Montejo's Biografia de un amarron. By theorizing the complex issue of authorship raised by these texts, Saldi'var expands the purview of studies and effectively moves beyond the nationalism of the narratives that he reads.Chapter four supplements Saldivar's earlier work in Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies (1997), specifically the linkage he made between the subaltern knowledges in the borderlands of the Americas and Foucault's notion of subjugated knowledges. By reflecting on John Rechy's magical urbanism and the performance art of El Vez, the Mexican Elvis, Saldi'var begins map out the recent shift in Chican@ studies towards a more transnational approach space and tradition. …

Truth or Dare

The performative identities of both Black and queer characters in film have been noted by academics in “Black queer diasporic theory” (Rinaldo Walcott) and artists such as Cheryl Dunye and Isaac Julien, with particular focus on the ways in which these identities have been constructed from both within and outside of their respective communities. Australian Indigenous and lesbian filmmaker Sonja Dare took the discourse one step further, however, in her 2007 release Destiny in Alice, a twenty-seven-minute mockumentary film which parodies a David Attenborough-style search for the rare “desert lesbian” of Alice Springs in Australia's outback. Her film actively pursues the intersection of cultural and sexual expressiveness and suppression, interrogates notions of belonging and exclusion within these communities, and challenges marginalisations of all subaltern identities in the evolving criticality of performing race, sex and gender in modernity.

Entangling the Fashion Subject Through the African Diaspora: From Not to (K)not in Fashion Theory

African diasporic theory offers a way to break out of oppositional thinking and evolutionary notions of progress. African American epistemologies—in conversation with other African diasporic thought—can be characterized as moving beyond either/or frameworks to “both/and” ways of knowing. Identity nots become identity (k)nots when entanglement replaces opposition and evolution as an organizing logic to account for diverse subject positions. Drawing on African diasporic theory, we propose a new (k)notty model to describe the entanglements within fashion subjectivity. The productive nodes of our examination include the wardrobe of Michelle Obama, the “sagging” (low-slung pants) phenomenon, National Basketball Association dress codes, and the business strategy of Sean John. The knot metaphor highlights how stories and explanations can only be viewed as tentative and partial, as power relations both reveal and conceal multiple truths and meanings.

Diaspora by Bus: Reginald McKnight, Postmodernism, and Transatlantic Subjectivity

In the 1980s, Evan Norris, the narrator of Reginald McKnight's novel I Get on the Bus (1990), crosses the Atlantic from America Africa under the sway of political currents that propelled a critical strain of diasporic theory in the twentieth century. Influenced in part by his girlfriend Wanda, his moral touchstone, Evan hopes that this transatlantic voyage will counter European designs to keep the black diaspora from ever coming home reclaim the power of familyhood (165). Wanda employs familial rhetoric encode a heroic pursuit of racial solidarity around the globe. No less alluring is this ideology's promise reinvent Evan's identity by positioning him within a seamless continuum of kinship and communal belonging. Through its reinvention of the individual subject and the collective consciousness of the diaspora, this paradigm powerfully challenges European hegemony. Wanda's labor politicize Evan's identity evokes the concern with literal and symbolic returns Africa that has become a sine qua non in the thought of diasporic activists and aesthetes. While black Atlantic discourse, broadly construed, has undoubtedly been characterized by disparate, competing agendas, redemptive homecoming has been reproduced across social divides in a way that warrants framing it as an ideological dominant within transatlantic modernity. Stuart Hall evocatively refers traditional returns as a oneness that provides a people with stable unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning, beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of actual history (Cultural Identity 393).