Introduction – South Asian Diasporas and (imaginary) homelands: why representations still matter

ABSTRACT

This special issue of South Asian Diaspora explores how films, literature, photography and social media construct and re-present narratives of homelands and diasporas, as well as investigating the ways which these same narratives are disseminated, appropriated and/or challenged in relation to recent political developments in South Asia and in the diaspora. By focusing on a spectrum of different media of communications, the articles collected in this special issue pose the work of representation at the centre of diasporic politics as they investigate the ways in which representations inform the ways in which diasporic subjects (writers, filmmakers, social media users, etc.) imagine themselves as well as their homelands.

KEYWORDS:

• South Asian diaspora
• homeland
• representation
• imagination
• identities

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the contributors and anonymous peer-reviewers of the articles.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Clelia Clini is a Research Associate at Loughborough University London. She has published in the field of South Asian diasporic literature and cinema; migration and the Indian Punjabi diaspora in Italy; forced displacement, creative arts and wellbeing. She is currently working on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project Migrant Memory and the Postcolonial Imagination. She was a postdoctoral researcher at University College London and has taught for years at John Cabot University (Rome) and at The American University of Rome. She received her PhD in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies from the University Orientale of Napoli (IT).

Deimantas Valančiūnas is Associate Professor of film and popular cultures of Asia at the Institute of Asian and Transcultural Studies, Vilnius University where he teaches courses on film studies, South Asian cinema and literature, postcolonial theory, visual cultures of Asia. His research interests include Indian and South Asian cinema, marginal and obscure film genres, postcolonial theory, diaspora and memory studies. He is an editor of a volume From Highbrow to Lowbrow. Studies of Indian B-grade Cinema and Beyond (2014) and a number of journal articles on Indian cinema. Currently Deimantas Valančiūnas is co-editing a book volume ‘South Asian Gothic’ (co-editor Katarzyna Ancuta, expected to be published by UWP in 2021).