Diasporic Inquiries into South Asian Women’s Narratives

Alien Domiciles

Edited by Shilpa Daithota Bhat

The South Asian women’s diaspora engages in spatio-temporal interactions and power differentials in a variety of narratives, articulating agency, multiplicities of belonging and culturally integrative practices, highlighting homing paradigms. The sense of alienness in a new homeland, rather in worldwide home places, triggers rethinking of diasporic conceptions and epistemes of individual and group histories, personal and collective experiences. Some of the questions that this anthology seeks to consider are: How do women from the South Asian diaspora represent cultural negotiations and alienness of the adopted homeland in various narratives? What are the themes/issues they select to portray their perceptions of foreignness? How do culture, history and politics intervene in their portrayal of lived experiences? How do they locate themselves in the matrix of foreignness and diaspora? The contributors to this anthology examine narratives depicting South Asian women, their complexly positioned voices, gesturing at the proliferating challenges and reflecting the grim realities of a globalized world.

Lexington Books

Pages: 230 • Trim: 6¼ x 9

978-1-4985-9176-8 • Hardback • February 2020 • $105.00 • (£81.00)

978-1-4985-9177-5 • eBook • February 2020 • $45.00 • (£35.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Asian / Indic

Diasporic Inquiries into South Asian Women’s Narratives

Alien Domiciles

Hardback

eBook

Summary

The South Asian women’s diaspora engages in spatio-temporal interactions and power differentials in a variety of narratives, articulating agency, multiplicities of belonging and culturally integrative practices, highlighting homing paradigms. The sense of alienness in a new homeland, rather in worldwide home places, triggers rethinking of diasporic conceptions and epistemes of individual and group histories, personal and collective experiences. Some of the questions that this anthology seeks to consider are: How do women from the South Asian diaspora represent cultural negotiations and alienness of the adopted homeland in various narratives? What are the themes/issues they select to portray their perceptions of foreignness? How do culture, history and politics intervene in their portrayal of lived experiences? How do they locate themselves in the matrix of foreignness and diaspora? The contributors to this anthology examine narratives depicting South Asian women, their complexly positioned voices, gesturing at the proliferating challenges and reflecting the grim realities of a globalized world.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 230 • Trim: 6¼ x 9

978-1-4985-9176-8 • Hardback • February 2020 • $105.00 • (£81.00)

978-1-4985-9177-5 • eBook • February 2020 • $45.00 • (£35.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / Asian / Indic

Author

Shilpa Daithota Bhat is assistant professor at Ahmedabad University, Gujarat, India.

Table of Contents

Introduction, Shilpa Daithota Bhat

Section 1: Domicile Tropes

Chapter 1: ‘You are here, says the arrow’: The Body as Home in the Poetry of Moniza Alvi, Setara Pracha

Chapter 2: India, Heat, Dust and Tea?: Alienness and Marketability in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala

and Nicole C. Vosseler, Alejandra Moreno-Álvarez

Chapter 3: “[A] girl from the village: totally unspoilt”: Nazneen’s ‘Unhomeliness’ in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Sam Naidu

Section 2: Shifting Domiciles

Chapter 4: Ethnography of a Hyphen? The Gendering of Gen-X Diasporic Agency, Gurbir Singh Jolly

Chapter 5: Migration and Sexuality in S. J. Sindu’s Marriage of a Thousand Lies, Maryse Jayasuriya

Chapter 6: Reimagining Reluctance: The South-Asian Diaspora and Global ‘Homing’ in Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Shuhita Bhattacharjee

Section 3: Domicile Significations

Chapter 7: Negotiating the “Postcolonial Exotic” through Subversive Third-Person Narration

in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Lara Virginia Kattekola

Chapter 8: Singing the Subaltern Woman: Film, feminism and Qawwali in the South Asian diaspora, Lauren Bettridge

Chapter 9: Song, Narrative, Belonging: The Place of Song in the Oral Histories of Sri Lankan Tamil women in London, Jasmine Hornabrook

Chapter 10: Domesticating the Alien: Culinary references and food rituals in The Song of the Sun God, Shashikala Assella

Reviews

For an anthropologist, these original and insightful essays on diasporic novels, music, and performance in the South Asian diaspora open up fascinating old-new questions about the subtleties and ironies of seemingly intractable crucibles surrounding women and home(ing): of hyphenated identities, fluid sexualities, transnational living and the ambivalences of belonging.
— Pnina Werbner, Professor Emerita, Keele University

Ambitious in its scope, Shilpa Daithota Bhat’s Diasporic Inquiries into South Asian Women’s Narratives, examines notions of homing, domicile, and alienness in South Asian women’s narratives. This anthology will be of interest to scholars of Diaspora Studies, Migration Studies, and Women and Gender Studies. Individual essays can also be incorporated in postgraduate coursework.

— South Asian Diaspora

Diasporic Inquiries into South Asian Women’s Narratives

Alien Domiciles

Edited by Shilpa Daithota Bhat

Diasporic Inquiries into South Asian Women’s Narratives

Alien Domiciles

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