Between Home and Homeland: South Asian Diaspora Literature and Film

1. Between Home and Homeland: South Asian Diaspora Literature and Film 2010Spring Kate Liu

2. Outline • Diaspora: Definitions • Diaspora Criticism & Related Issues • South Asian Diaspora • Deepa Mehta

3. 1. What is Diaspora?

4. Diaspora • Dia –”across”; sperien – “to sow or scatter seeds.” • Displaced communities of people who have been dislocated from their native homeland through the movement of migration, immigration, or exile. (Braziel and Mannur 1) • The word appears “pervaded medieval rabbinical writings on the Jewish diaspora, to describe the plight of Jews living outside of Palestine” (Braziel and Mannur 1) • (negative) Exilic, nostalgic (e.g. 落葉歸根,the lonely sojourner) • (positive) fertility of dispersion, dissemination, and the scattering of seeds. (e.g. The Black Atlantic)

5. Five kinds of Diaspora • Victim(e.g. Jews, Africans, Armenians), • Labour (e.g. Indian, Chinese), • Trade (e.g. Chinese and Lebanese), • Imperial (e.g. the British), • Cultural diasporas. (Cohen ix)

6. Some Quotations . . . (1) • "Migration is a one way trip. There is no ‘home’ to go back to“(Hall 1988).

7. Some Quotations . . .(2) 1. Diaspora as oneness (in history and identity). 2. Diaspora as heterogeneity (or discontinuous points of identification). “The diaspora experience as I intend it here is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeniety and diversity; by a conception of 'identity' which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.“ (S. Hall “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 401-402 )

8. Some Quotations . . . (3) • All diasporas are unhappy, but every diaspora is unhappy in its own way. Diasporas refer to people who do not feel comfortable with their nonhyphenated identities as indicated on their passport. Diasporas are people who would want to explore the meaning of the hyphen, but perhaps not press the hyphen too far for fear that this would lead to massive communal schizophrenia. They are precariously lodged within an episteme of real or imagined displacements, self-imposed sense of exile; they are haunted by spectres, by ghosts arising from within that encourage irredentist or separatist movements. Diasporas are both celebrated (by late/postmodernity) and maligned (by early modernity). (Mishra 1)

9. Some Quotations . . . (4) • The concept of diaspora places the discourse of ‘home’ and ‘dispersion’ in creative tension, inscribing a homing desire while simultaneously critiquing discourses of fixed origins. (Brah 192-93) • Homing desire  third time-space

10. Diaspora Criticism—Why and How?

11. Diaspora Criticism—Why? • Diaspora forces us to rethink the rubrics of nation and nationalism, while refiguring the relations of citizens and nation-states. • Diaspora offers myriad, dislocated sites of contestation to the hegemonic, homogenizing forces of globalization. • (Braziel and Mannur 7-12)

12. Diaspora Criticism—How? three scenes of exemplification – 1. scene of dual territoriality-- the emphasis falls on divided terrains as exemplars seek to account for diasporic subjects, cultures and aesthetic effects in terms of the subjective split between the geo-psychical entities of here and there, of hostland and homeland. (e.g. R. Cohen) 2. scene of situational laterality (e.g. S. Hall, Paul Gilroy) – • diasporic identity linked to situation-specific becoming, or the middle passage (milieu) in the active sense, rather than to the tensional pressures exercised by bipolar nation-states. • Multi-locale diaspora, simultaneously sundered from and sutured to its various psycho-territories (S. Mishra 17)

13. Diaspora Criticism—How? (2) • scene of archival specificity – archive: “‘systems that establish statements as events’ while differentiating them in their multiple existence and situating them in their unique duration (Foucault, 1992: 128–31).” (S. Mishra 101) • E.g. Indian diaspora–Indians from different places give -- different definitions to the word “homeland” -- different answers to the question “where do you come from?”

14. Indian Diaspora Diaspora Map • India – a quick look • The old Indian diaspora: the movement of indentured labour to the colonies (South Africa, Fiji, Trinidad, Guyana, etc.) for the production of sugar, rubber, and tin for the growing British and European markets. • Broke off their connection from home • The new Indian diaspora: largely a post-1960s phenomenon distinguished by the movement of economic migrants (but also refugees) into the metropolitan centres of the former empire as well as the New World and Australia . (V. Mishra qtd in S. Mishra 101-02)

15. Major Issues -- • what are the reasons for the characters to immigrate, sometimes more than once?  • how do these texts construct the diasporic spaces: either the “Here” of Canada, UK and US, or “There” of Tanzania for M.G. Vassanji, Sri Lanka for Shyam Selvadurai and Michael Ondaatje, and Trinidad for Shani Mootoo and Neil Bissoondath—or a space in-between and mixing the two. • how do factors of race, gender and nation intersect to influence the characters’ senses of identityand their relations? • how do the writers’ in-between position influence their writing styles and views of their “home countries,” histories and cultures? (queering their nations, cultural brokerage or sell-out?) • Terms: travel, translation and dialogue, hybridity, trauma and mourning, diasporic space and imaginary

16. diasporic imaginary • “I want to suggest that the diasporic imaginary is a condition (and ‘imaginary’ is the key concept here) of an impossible mourning that transforms mourning into melancholia. In the imaginary of diasporas both mourning and melancholia persist, sometimes in intensely contradictory ways at the level of the social. …Freud -- melancholia is in some ways related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious.(1984a: 254)” (V. Mishra 9).

17. Deepa Mehta (Born 1950 in Amritsar, Punjab, India) [Indian d] Heaven on Earth (2008) [India] Water (2005) The Republic of Love (2003) Bollywood/Hollywood (2002) [India] Earth (1998) [India] Fire (1996) Camilla (1994) [Indian d] Sam and Me (1992) Image source: http://dearcinema.com/interview-deepa-mehta-729

18. Fire (1996) Water (2005) Background: 1) On its opening day in India, some movie theaters were attacked by Hindu fundamentalists, and the movie was eventually banned for religious insensitivity. The film was banned in Pakistan for the lesbian relationship that the movie plays around. 2) Water’s film set burned in 2000 in the holy city of Varanasi.

19. Fire (1996) Characters • Radha Ashok  Swami (holy master, 聖哲) • Sita and Jatin  Julie • Biji, Mundu Note: Sita—the wife of Rama, Sita is esteemed as the standard setter for wifely and womanly virtues for all Hindu women. Two Scenes of third spaces: 46:31 -- about the custom of fasting 48 – Chinese vs. Indian

20. Works Cited • Braziel, Jana Evans & Anita Mannur. Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Wiley-Blackwell, 2003. • Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1997. • Hall, Stuart. “'Minimal Selves' in Identity: The Real Me.” ICA Document 6, 1988. • ---. "Cultural Identity and Diaspora.“ Colonial Discourse & Postcolonial Theory: A Reader.  Eds. Williams, Patrick & Laura Chrisman. Harvester Whaeatsheaf, 1993. • Mishra, Vijay. Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary. New York: Taylor & Francis Routledge, 2007.