Abstract
Embedded so often within the conceptual term ‘diaspora’ is a sense of fragmented and splintered belonging, a longing for home, and a forfeiture of a well-defined cultural identity: it is this that a scattering of an imagined community of people engenders. Yet, as my first epigraph contends, the diaspora can also be a space of creativity, of innovation, and the productive rupturing of boundaries and prescribed limits. Lingering primarily upon the pain of resettlement, the eloquent prose of Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers portrays an isolated and unnamed Pakistani community somewhere in contemporary Britain. My second epigraph, taken from that novel, gestures towards this dispossession, but it too reveals emerging distinctions of perceived belonging amongst different generations of the same diaspora. It is these reorientations of the term ‘diaspora’ within ‘new South-Asian diaspora writing’ that this chapter will explore, via Aslam’s Maps, Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani and M.G. Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song. Initially drawing together the two novels, Maps and Londonstani—in many ways an unequal levelling, as I shall later comment—I explore the dual trajectories Bryan Cheyette describes in my first epigraph, as well as the ways in which we can productively nuance our approach to new South-Asian diaspora writing.
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Notes
- 1.
Hereafter Aslam’s novel is referred to as Maps.
- 2.
Noteworthy here is the literary magazine Wasafiri for the platform it provides in showcasing a range of emerging diasporic writers.
- 3.
There have been various studies into these authors: for instance, see Sara Upstone who, in British Asian Fiction: Twenty-first-century Voices (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), reflects upon many of these writers in her author-specific chapters; Dave Gunning, Race and Antiracism in Black British and British Asian Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010); Susheila Nasta, Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
- 4.
In her introduction, Shukla discusses the term ‘Indian diaspora’ in depth.
- 5.
- 6.
For a reading of the isolation, alienation and struggle between an orthodox formulation of Islam and modernity in Maps, see Butt (2008).
- 7.
Indeed, as Ali’s novel Brick Lane (2003) suggests, it is worth noting that the prosperity of Malkani’s Hounslow characters is also not shared by the Bangladeshi diaspora in the East End of London.
- 8.
Via Kureishi’s My Son the Fanatic, Mondal also offers a reading of generational difference amongst the diaspora, with a focus on how religious identity is claimed amongst varying age groups. Within the growing body of research on ‘Muslim writing’, in addition to the edited collection in which Mondal’s chapter appears (Chambers and Herbert 2015), notable works include: Ahmed et al.’s Culture, Diaspora, and Modernity in Muslim Writing (2012), Nash’s Writing Muslim Identity (2012) and Santesso Disorientation: Muslim Identity in Contemporary Anglophone Literature (2012).
- 9.
There is little study of the regional identity affiliations. With the exploration of the diasporic popularity of the dance and music form bhangra, there is some excavation of ‘Punjabiness’; however, scant attention has been paid to other forms of regional identity. The specificity of ‘Gujaratiness’, and the way in which it manifests itself in the diaspora, fracturing Indian nationalism, is discussed in my doctoral thesis ‘Reading the Double Diaspora: Cultural Representations of Gujarati East Africans in Britain’(unpublished thesis: University of Leeds, Parmar 2013a). Jessica Marie Falcone (2013) also engages with a sense of Gujaratiness as manifested during garba dance. Tommaso Bobbio (2012) provides some study on the notion of what he describes as a ‘subnational’ identity. He offers a political understanding of Gujarati identity within India itself, an identity that is framed by economic development and Hindu extremism. In light of the current political climate in India, this is a useful article that speaks to India’s Bharatiya Janata Party’s proposition of Gujaratiness, and to my later reading of M.G. Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song.
- 10.
It is worth noting the experience and skill set of these double migrants is different from migrants directly settled in the UK from India.
- 11.
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Parmar, M. (2016). Writing South-Asian Diasporic Identity Anew. In: Tickell, A. (eds) South-Asian Fiction in English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40354-4_13
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