Identity in Diaspora and Diaspora in Writing: The poetics of cultural transrelation

Abstract

This essay examines the complexity and ambivalence associated with defining and articulating identity in diaspora. What diaspora implies is not only a movement across the borders of a country, but also the experience of traversing boundaries and barriers of space, time, race, culture, language and history. As a multifold journey over various discursive and non-discursive domains, diaspora enacts a socio-cultural practice that thrives on a process of constant resignification of the established assumptions and meanings of identity. Asian diaspora literature in Canada, with its ethnic vacillation and cultural ambivalence, demonstrates that the forces of different (trans)national elements may merge in a poetics of cultural transrelation, which challenges the locality of a singular cultural dominance by relocating the site of identity formation in a collective of plural inter-relationships.

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