Diasporic Inquiries into South Asian Women’s Narratives

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

• Introduction, Shilpa Daithota BhatSection 1: Domicile TropesChapter 1: ‘You are here, says the arrow’: The Body as Home in the Poetry of Moniza Alvi, Setara PrachaChapter 2: India, Heat, Dust and Tea?: Alienness and Marketability in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Nicole C. Vosseler, Alejandra Moreno-ÁlvarezChapter 3: “[A] girl from the village: totally unspoilt”: Nazneen’s ‘Unhomeliness’ in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Sam NaiduSection 2: Shifting DomicilesChapter 4: Ethnography of a Hyphen? The Gendering of Gen-X Diasporic Agency, Gurbir Singh JollyChapter 5: Migration and Sexuality in S. J. Sindu’s Marriage of a Thousand Lies, Maryse JayasuriyaChapter 6: Reimagining Reluctance: The South-Asian Diaspora and Global ‘Homing’ in Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Shuhita BhattacharjeeSection 3: Domicile SignificationsChapter 7: Negotiating the “Postcolonial Exotic” through Subversive Third-Person Narration in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Lara Virginia KattekolaChapter 8: Singing the Subaltern Woman: Film, feminism and Qawwali in the South Asian diaspora, Lauren BettridgeChapter 9: Song, Narrative, Belonging: The Place of Song in the Oral Histories of Sri Lankan Tamil women in London, Jasmine HornabrookChapter 10: Domesticating the Alien: Culinary references and food rituals in The Song of the Sun God, Shashikala Assella

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.