Shifting Continents / Colliding Cultures

Abstract

In the wake of the steady expansion and more recent explosion of Anglo-Indian and Indo-Anglian writing, and following the success of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, the literature of the Indian diaspora has become the object of close attention. As a body of literature, it simultaneously represents an important multicultural perspective within individual ‘national' literatures (such as those of Canada or Australia) as well as a more global perspective taking in the phenomena of transculturalism and diaspora. However, while readers may share an interest in the writing of the Indian diaspora, they do not always interpret the notion of ‘Indian diaspora' in the same way. Indeed, there has been much debate in recent years about the appropriateness of terms such as diaspora and exile. Should these terms be reserved for the specifically historical nature of problems encountered in the process of acquiring new nationality and citizenship, or can they be extended to the writing of literature itself or used to describe ‘economic' migration arising out of privilege? As a response to these debates, Shifting Continents/Colliding Cultures explores the aftermath of British colonialism on the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka, including the resulting diaspora. The essays also examine zones of intersection between theories of postcolonial writing and models of diaspora and the nation. Particular lines of investigation include: how South-Asian identity is negotiated in Western spaces, and its reverse, how Western identity is negotiated in South-Asian space; reading identity by privileging history; the role of diasporic women in the (Western) nation; how diaspora affects the literary canon; and how diaspora is used in the production of alternative identities in films such as Gurinder Chadha's Bhaji on the Beach.

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