Diasporic Relationalities: Queer Affiliations in Shani Mootoo's “Out on Main Street”

Abstract

This paper offers a critical reading of Shani Mootoo's “Out on Main Street” as an alternative to the neoliberal Indian state's mobilization of diaspora discourse. I suggest that the nationalist construction of an undifferentiated diasporic Indian subject is the outcome of a project of forgetting in which histories of colonial indenture are subsumed by the Indian state's global capitalist ambitions. I read “Out on Main Street” not only as a representation of the residues of British colonialism embodied in multiply displaced postcolonial subjects, but also as a text that theorizes diaspora queerly to critique the essentialism of diasporic nationalisms and imagine queer feminist modes of affiliation and collectivity that resist the beckoning call of exclusionary nationalisms.