Postcolonial Diaspora Research Articles

Social Roles in Kipling's Kim: A Postcolonial Study

Examining Kim as a diaspora group subject to colonial rule in India is the goal of this study. Kim played a multiracial young man who traveled with Lama. According to this analysis, Kim is Irish and native-born. The characters and their social structure depict India as a diverse society. In Kipling's multicolored depiction of India, the characters perform a variety of roles depending on their lineage. This research focuses on the social norms that apply to individuals in diaspora groups. This study looks at Kim as a postcolonial diaspora and cosmopolitan from the standpoint of Robin Cohen. This research demonstrates Kim's love of India and his respect for the locals. However, he claims to be white and to be of that race. For this study, the qualitative research methodology has been employed. The significance of the study lies in its ability to provide new light on Kim's multicultural status in British India. The study has been delimited to focus exclusively on the novel's global nature via Cohen's prism of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism. This research demonstrates that Kim, Hurree Babu, and Mehbub Ali are cosmopolitans in British Indian society. They have different forms of control in India than their ancestors did.

Deconstruction of Postcolonial Diaspora in Disgrace: From Specific Victimization of Humans to Group Portrait of Non-Humans

Deconstruction of Postcolonial Diaspora in Disgrace: From Specific Victimization of Humans to Group Portrait of Non-Humans

Identity Politics in Ayad's Homeland Elegies: A Diasporic Study

Introduction: "Homeland Elegies" by Ayad Akhtar (2020) is a deeply personal exploration of identity and belonging in a fractured nation. Blending fact and fiction, this work narrates a story of longing and dispossession in the post-9/11 world. It intertwines family drama, social commentary, and picaresque elements, focusing on the relationship between a father, a son, and their shared homeland. Methodology: Akhtar employs a new narrative voice to depict a country ravaged by financial ruin and compromised ideals. The narrative highlights the fear experienced by immigrants and critiques a society led by a TV personality as president. Postcolonial diaspora theory and hybridity serve as significant theoretical tools to construct the conceptual framework. Results/Findings: The novel reveals how unhealed wounds from 9/11 continue to impact the world, portraying diverse settings from American heartland towns to European suites and Afghan guerilla hideouts.

The Examination of Stuart Hall’s Postcolonial Perspective on Displacement and Identity Discontinuity in Fadia Faqir’s The Cry of the Dove (2007).

Displacement is a key concept in postcolonial Diaspora literature that interprets the transition from the motherland, native culture, traditions, and native language to a different setting. Such geographical, cultural and psychological transitions result in an identity crisis, fragmentation and discontinuity. The objective of this study is to investigate, in Fadia Faqir's The Cry of the Dove, the process of identity development amid displacement of a female Arab Muslim in a postcolonial setting. Using Stuart Hall's theory of Cultural Identity and Diaspora, this article applies a postmodern reading on the novel to discern how displacement affects the identity of the main protagonist Salma. Hence, Salma experiences a series of encounters following her transition from her original space to a new one that results in an identity crisis characterised by fragmentation, sense of alienation and uncertainty. In a postmodernist Stuart Hallian sense, Fadia Faqir’s female protagonist suffers from an existentialist, discontinuous identity characterized by skepticism, uncertainty, fragmentation and paradox, following a journey of physical and psychological displacement.

Jasmine in the Search of Identity through a Postcolonial Diaspora Lens

Abstract Applying a postcolonial diaspora lens through Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of the ‘third space’ to Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine (1989), this paper aims to demonstrate how diasporic women negotiate for an identity in their struggle for a better life in the host land. Having ‘no home’ and ‘no host’, Mukherjee’s protagonist, Jasmine, whose life represents that of the postcolonial immigrant woman, finds an identity in the intercultural process, the ‘third space’. A discourse analysis of this novel and current knowledge of diaspora studies are applied to understanding immigrants’ challenges, postcolonial identity and diaspora-related cultural issues. The paper closely examines cultural hybridity, third space and women’s search for identity in these confrontations. It throws light on a widow’s life and how she tries to get away from the restrictions of home and redesign her identity in a third space in the context of feminism, diaspora and culture in a postcolonial and diasporic world.

“People expect you to choose”: Postcolonial hybridity in complex geographies of scaled diaspora identities

Hybridity in geography, specifically hybridity through a postcolonial lens, is often removed from postcolonial origins regarding geographic scale. I argue that postcolonial hybridity is key to situating geographic scalar identity within the context of postcolonial diasporas navigating competing ideas of nationalism and regionalism. Postcolonial hybridity as opposed to hybridity as hyphenated identity, provides a historically contingent lens useful to contextualizing lived scalar identities within diaspora communities, particularly in the United States, a nation founded on settler colonial ideologies. Drawing from 3 years of observational and interview-based research in the US Indian Tamil diaspora, I argue that scalar identity is a directly influenced by colonial constructions of race, identity, and ideas of nationalism. Drawing from Bhabha’s (1994) concept of hybridity, I demonstrate how scalar identity can be reconceptualized with respect to postcolonial geographies of identity.

MONIZA ALVI’S DIASPORIC SENSIBILITY IN CONSTRUCTING GENDER IN SPLIT WORLD POEMS AND BLACK BIRD BYE BYE

Dislocation form a foremost concern for all the colonized indigenous people, acting as a model for the phenomenon of diaspora. This results not just in cultural assignation but cultural rotation as well. The research derives guide from Ashcroft, Tiffin and Grifith’s seminal work, The Empire Writes Back in examining how dislocation from a place creates concerns concerning identity and authenticity on the behalf of the writer in question. This particular methodology emphasizes on the appropriateness of an external language for the description of indigenous people in postcolonial diaspora literature. Krippendorff’s textual analysis method, “Content Analysis” is used to explore and collect the themes in relativeness to women, men and place from the poetic works of Moniza Alvi along with a postcolonial theory in the background. The present study discusses how Moniza Alvi’s diasporic sensibility discursively constructs indigenous female in the Split World Poems and male in Black Bird Bye Bye, respectively. Keywords: diaspora, discursive, indigenous, place, gender, postcolonial.

Introduction: The Question of Chineseness in Colonial and Postcolonial Diasporas

Introduction: The Question of Chineseness in Colonial and Postcolonial Diasporas

Of exile and artists

The aim of this paper is to record and define the relationship between the ‘artist’ and the theme of ‘exile’ which constantly fascinated the literary writers and critics across the globe over the years. As creative artists and critics many of the twentieth and twenty-first century novelists - to name a few, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, Jhumpa Lahiri and so on. - have been preoccupied with the idea of ‘exile’ and alienation of ‘self’ which places them in the category of post-colonial diaspora writers. Examining the emotional intensity of an exiled individual most of these literary writers of the era have themselves been either nomads or globe-trotters connecting themselves to the vital nerve-center of contemporary mainstream life. The tragic sense of uprootedness of an individual’s existence who is everywhere and still ‘nowhere’ on this globe gathers substance from the alienated self that is theirs sometimes crying, other times searching for a true or real home in their writings.

Review Article: Homelandings: Postcolonial Diasporas and Transatlantic Belongings (2016) by Rahul Gairola

We all discover over and over again the kind of strange and violent stranglehold history has over us. We deploy histories to explain our pasts, identify the present, and orient us to the future. As Rahul K. Gairola shows in Homelandings: Postcolonial Diasporas and Transatlantic Belongings, the multiple currents of history have dictated our methods for establishing our home-sites: who belongs and who does not belong in any given place. Our “at-home” practices, one dimension of “the double-bind of history as home…” (2016, xvi), have a deep and lasting impact on how we move about and participate in the world-at-large. Homelandings provides a timely intervention into the theoretical discourse on the “home-site” as the outcome of a “home-economics” that continually reenacts the persistent racism, classicism, sexism, and queerphobia of a neoliberal bio-political governmentality of the Anglosphere (Bennet’s term, cited in Gairola, 18). The project offers “homelandings,” Gairola’s neologism, as the process of resistance to and reappropriation of “home-sites”: “producing new homes in which alternative modes of community and belonging flourish and reproduce” (17). Homelandings—with “landings” as the demarcator of that which is in motion, always about to happen—then act as a series of transversal disruptors of the neoliberal sphere.

Decolonization and Diaspora

Decolonization and Diaspora

“Breaking language”: Performance and community in Suheir Hammad’s poetry

ABSTRACTThis article examines Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad’s strategy of “breaking language” across literary and performative modes, with a particular focus on the community structures that she establishes among her audiences and readers. It argues that her poetry – especially in its online remediation – challenges reactionary, nationalistic appeals to identity in the wake of public crisis by incorporating the disruptive action of “breaking” as a literary and performative device. In doing so, her work helps build more open, heterogeneous, and transnational affective bonds, both across and between established community lines. Reading performativity and community as major themes across Hammad’s work, the article tracks these influences from her performance of “first writing since” in 2002 to her 2008 poetry collection, breaking poems. An exploration of the connection between performativity and community in Hammad’s work is vital to understanding her contribution to contemporary American poetry and the broader literary landscape of postcolonial diaspora.

Diasporic culinary trajectories: Mapping food zones and food routes in first-generation South Asian and Caribbean culinary memoirs

ABSTRACTThis article examines two culinary memoirs that belong to two distinct postcolonial diasporas, the Caribbean, through a focus on Austin Clarke’s Pig Tails ‘n’ Breadfruit, and the South Asian diaspora, through a focus on Madhur Jaffrey’s Climbing the Mango Trees. As a South Asian diasporan, Jaffrey maps Delhi as a multicultural, pluri-faith town, with distinct (food) areas, to reflect contemporary views of the nation as diversity/unity, and define herself as a Muslim-Hindu hybrid. Austin Clarke maps food circulation within and from the Caribbean as a way to address the issues of human (forced) migrations and highlight continuity in the colonial logics of exploitation. By refusing to trace food routes to Africa, Clarke draws attention to native resistance and culinary and linguistic resilience. One memoir (Jaffrey) chooses métissage, the other (Clarke) creolization. Both illustrate how the culinary memoir engages the reader by offering an ethics of eating and cooking together.

Bloody Diaspora Theory for the Twenty-First Century: African and Asian Heritage Migrants Return

First, I begin by interrogating why blood as kinship, ethnicity, nationality, identity, etc., has been so clinically removed from so much Humanities-oriented poststructuralist and postcolonial diaspora theory, rendering it both bloodless and hostile towards the notion of a return to an ethnic homeland. Second, I analyze policies based on the “migration-development nexus” promoted by organizations like the World Bank with its reliance on a conception of bloody roots and an enduring ethnic homeland that is both essentialist and static. To point out the limitations of these theories, I examine some recent frontier heritage migrations in which Asian and African diasporic elites raised in Euro-America are “returning” to their ethnic homelands. Finally, I attempt to lay out some of the parameters of a more fluid, supple theory of diaspora for the twenty-first century that explores blood as an analytic tool that takes into account not only mobile yet bloody identities but also mutable places, dynamic economic change, and new forms of spatiotemporality. In other words, returning to the homeland is not what it used to be, hence new constructions of blood identification are now possible.

La postcolonialité de la littérature urbaine : vers une francophonie de l’intérieur ?

Until now postcolonial discourse and the subject of immigration have been accommodated in the main within literary Francophonie. The literature relating to immigration in France generally derived from the creations of writers from the former French colonies and even if they adopted French nationality, they would remain, however, French writers of immigration. But what is to be done when the writer is French by birth, has no direct connection with the condition of a colonized subject except perhaps by parental proxy and belongs to the postcolonial diaspora? This article is concerned with the realities of culture and identity that link suburban literature to postcolonial discourse. How does the periurban writer embody France in a postcolonial situation within his creations? These reflections lead us to propose the concept of Francophonie from within to justify the lack of symbolic boundaries between French and Francophone literatures by reference to productions from the suburbs.

Minor Miracles: Toward A Theory of Novelty in "Aya of Yopougon"

This essay undertakes a reparative reading of Aya of Yopougon, a multivolume graphic novel by Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie. Setting Aya alongside other African comics and prevailing interpretations of African and Diasporic literatures, this interpretation coins the term "novelty" to describe the unique mode of representing subjects, space, and time in the text. This "novelty" situates Aya at the intersection of tendencies in African, European, and North American comics art, and it juxtaposes subtle renditions of everyday life with overdetermined representations of African societies and Africans in Diaspora. The essay also articulates the relevance of novelty for feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories, comics scholarship, and Diaspora Studies.

The politics of dispersal: Turning Ugandan colonial subjects into postcolonial refugees (1967–76)

This article examines the role of postcolonial diasporic refugees, particularly East African Asian expellees, in international migration policy. It explores similar concerns with postcolonial diasporas and postcolonial identity issues in the homogeneous imagination of the decolonized nation states. Though the focus is on the creation of a global Ugandan Asian diaspora, developments in Kenya, as well as in Britain, and India are crucial keystones of this international history. The desire of these countries to reduce their responsibility for former colonial subjects eventually led to shifting conceptions of citizenship and international dispersal of postcolonial refugees. The Ugandan Asian expulsion became framed as a matter of international concern, rather than a purely British postcolonial problem. This paper claims that the internationalization of refugee resettlement served to cut through ties between the former colonial diaspora and the metropole (Britain) on the one hand and the diaspora and the motherland (India) on the other.

Identidades em campo. Discursos sobre a atuação de jogadores interculturais de origem africana e antilhana na seleção francesa de futebol

<p>O texto tem como objetivo principal analisar parte dos discursos produzidos sobre a participação de atletas interculturais – de origem africana ou antilhana – na seleção francesa de futebol na última década. Partindo dos referenciais teóricos vinculados aos estudos africanos e pós-coloniais, e fruto de uma investigação de maior dimensão, buscamos analisar a forma como a sociedade francesa – com seus conjuntos populacionais híbridos e complexos – fomenta, interpreta e rejeita, a partir das imagens e ideias construídas sobre os imigrantes africanos/antilhanos e seus descendentes, o entendimento acerca de suas identidades e das relações interculturais e multiculturais geradas pelas diásporas pós-coloniais. Selecionamos, para uma reflexão inicial, notícias veiculadas pela imprensa francesa e europeia sobre a atuação de atletas interculturais na seleção francesa após o campeonato mundial da África do Sul, em 2010.</p><div> </div>

The Future of “Diaspora” in Diaspora Studies: Has the Word Run Its Course?

38 A & Q Rhodes, John David, and Elena Gorfinkel, eds. 2011. Taking Place: Location and the Moving Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wang, Yiman. 2008. “The ‘Transnational’ as Methodology: Transnationalizing Chinese Film Studies through the Example of The Love Parade and Its Chinese Remakes.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 2, no. 1: 9–21. Yomota, Inuhiko. 2003. “Ajia eiga no taishuteki sozoryoku” [The popular imagination of Asian cinema]. In Ajia eiga no taishuteki sozoryoku [Popular cinema in Asia], 9–30. Tokyo: Seidosha. Zhang, Yingjin. 2007a. “Chinese Cinema and Transnational Film Studies .” In World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, edited by Natasa Durovikova and Kathleen E. Newman, 124–36. New York: Routledge. ———. 2007b. “Comparative Film Studies, Transnational Film Studies: Inter-disciplinarity, Crossmediality, and Transcultural Visuality in Chinese Cinema.” Journal of Chinese Cinema 1, no. 1: 27–40. The Future of “Diaspora” in Diaspora Studies: Has the Word Run Its Course? Evelyn Hu-DeHart As someone who has been linking the term diaspora to Chinese since the 1970s, when I gingerly began my investigation into the history of Chinese migration to Latin America and the Caribbean—a large region of the Americas not commanding much attention at the time in the consideration of the wide and massive dispersal of Chinese from their homeland to practically all corners of the world, from the Ming Dynasty through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first—I feel it necessary now to reassess the continuing deployment of this term within diaspora studies in general and Asian and Asian American studies in particular. Thirty some years ago, the term diaspora was not yet familiar to most people in and out of academia and was certainly not applied to the Chinese or any other wandering people aside from Jews, for whom the term seems to have been invented. Although the word was Greek, the Jews claimed it after expulsion from their homeland and subsequent worldwide dissemination over the course of two millennia, beginning in the ancient world. These dispersed Jewish communities-in-exile maintain a collective memory of, and fierce loyalty to, their original homeland, pledging as their primary mission as a people and a culture to regain and return to that homeland and to restore it to its former security and A & Q 39 prosperity. To live in perpetual exile and yearn for return outside the homeland is the essence of the Jewish diaspora. Moreover, that desire to return home from the diaspora has been fueled by a troubled relationship with host societies that cannot or will not accept them as social equals. According to some diasporic Jews, anti-Semitism has not abated but only intensified with time.1 Most Jews understand diaspora because it has been embedded into their collective identity.2 Many others, if they hear the word diaspora, would likely connect it to Jewish history. A few might also have heard talk about the African diaspora of the modern world. Accompanying the rise of capitalism and the colonial reach of Europe to Asia, Africa, and Latin America for markets and raw materials, the African slave trade saw for over four centuries the forced removal and sale of millions of men and women who were dispersed throughout the Americas as chattel slaves. Unified initially by the dehumanizing regime of New World (plantation) slavery and later reinforced by the demeaning regime of systematic and institutionalized racism, descendants of slaves identify with each other through race, as “black people,” and have created multiple expressions of blackness through culture—music, dance, art, literature—throughout the diaspora. In contrast to the Jewish diaspora, and some notable exceptions notwithstanding ,3 most descendants of slaves have not been driven by a returnto -Africa movement but invested more in dismantling antiblack racism and fighting for citizenship, civil, and equal rights in the postemancipation , postcolonial diaspora. Although not as deeply entrenched as diaspora is among Jews, for African Americans and descendants of slaves across the Americas, the term may have resonance. At the time that Africans were being forcibly removed from their ethnic homelands, or deceptively induced to leave home, Chinese people had already been actively trading around the South China seas and across the Indian Ocean to the Arabian Peninsula and the east coast of Africa...

The “I” in the Deconstruction of Frontiers through Memory: Postcolonial Diasporas

The North and South relations have changed in terms of migratory flow in the last 50 years. From colonial to postcolonial times, economic and political forces have been influencing men and women all over the world, particularly in Africa because of the heavy colonial inheritance, which explains the tight link between the two worlds. Besides, there has always been a reciprocal fascination between the West and developing countries, at the same time with a kind of distrust between both worlds. Beyond trade relations, the migration movements have surely inscribed those colonial and postcolonial links, those relations between the ‘civilised’ and the ‘barbarous’ world. The human geographical map has been transformed by these migrations. Within this prospect and reality, I propose to look into these migration movements first from a historical point of view, and then through their impact on the subject of the new diaspora in the sense that these migrations have changed the perception of the ‘Other’ in our postcolonial world. I will discuss how these various migrations have created a blurring of the frontiers, real or imaginative. I hope to show in fine also how these post-colonial migration flows created new identities, new maps, those of the diaspora in relation with key issues such as ‘identities and territories’ in the sense given by Homi Bhabha to internationalism, which is the “history of postcolonial migrations.”