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Abstract
In my paper “Queering the Colonial” I will analyze Sri-Lankan-Canadian novelist Shyam Selvadurai’s novel Swimming in the Monsoon Sea (2005) to facilitate a discussion where a diasporic heterosexual intervention enables South Asian queer discursive spaces initiate new alliances with heteronormativity that blur the boundaries between homosexuality/heterosexuality. Further, my study will help reflect on how a return to pre-colonial South Asian architecture – an amalgamation of styles from Greece, Afghanistan, and India – can expand the idea of a global South Asia across time and space. In my article I will show that the colonial silencing of a two-thousand-year-old civilization was never complete; it is only through a strategic negotiation with a pre-colonial past that postcolonial South Asia can initiate non-reductive non-western epistemologies of understanding South Asian queer and female. While examining how South Asian homosociality complicates western attitudes toward queerness, I will also extend the conversation to show a shift in power when teenage Amrith de-centers Othello and defies traditional portrayal of women, for instance, of a passive Desdemona. Drawing on South Asian feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories, the paper will negotiate across different borders, critique extant colonial ideologies, and open up new interpretive frameworks of understanding postcolonial South Asian literature.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Selvadurai, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, 75.
2 Ibid., 268.
3 Ibid., 267.
4 Bakshi, “The Queer Outsider,” 188.
5 Selvadurai, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, 8.
6 Menon, A History of Desire in India, 19.
7 Hawley notes that there are multiple challenges of using the Western academic term “queer” to describe South Asian bodies. While the term has its theoretical connotations, it also fails to capture the historical, cultural, and regional subtleties by reducing all alternative sexual behaviors under one queer umbrella. For the sake of convenience therefore, I appropriate Ara Wilson’s definition of the term from her essay “Queering Asia”: “My use of queer is provisional academic shorthand that denotes an unfixed set of subjects and that also flags an affiliation with critical analytic approaches, including queer theory but also feminist and postcolonial theory.” (http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue14/wilson.html)
8 Chari, “Colonial Fantasies and Postcolonial Identities,” 280.
9 Hawley, Postcolonial Queer, 4.
10 Chakraborty, Postcolonial Urban Outcasts 11.
11 Gopinath, Unruly Visions, 87–90.
12 Chakraborty, Postcolonial Urban Outcasts 4.
13 Ibid., 5.
14 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” 3.
15 Butler, “Imitation and Gender Subordination,” 312.
16 Bakshi, “The Queer Outsider,” 172.
17 Ibid., 173.
18 Selvadurai, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, 129.
19 Ibid., 163–165.
20 Menon, A History of Desire in India, 19.
21 Butler, “Imitation and Gender Subordination,” 307–308.
22 Selvadurai, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, 167.
23 Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” 333.
24 Selvadurai, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, 36.
25 I am particularly indebted to Hema Chari for her nuanced distinction between postcolonial masculinity and colonial masculinity. In her analysis of Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, Chari defines postcolonial masculinity as a form practiced during the imperial British period which later defined the idea of masculinity. Colonial masculinity on the other hand distinguished itself from the imperial masculinity in its “specific practices” that shaped the “genealogy of masculinity” in postcolonial nations’ through political and cultural supremacy/legitimization of the “virile male body” (282-283).
26 Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 2.
27 Selvadurai, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, 103.
28 Ibid., 104.
29 Ibid., 108.
30 Ibid., 117, 128, 133, 191.
31 Ibid., 153.
32 Ibid., 154.
33 Ibid., 195.
34 Ibid., 197.
35 Ibid., 196.
36 Ibid., 156.
37 Ibid., 142, 155.
38 Ibid., 227–228.
39 Gairola, “Limp Wrists, Inflammatory Punches,” 2.
40 Selvadurai, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, 205.
41 Ibid., 234.
42 Ibid., 234.
43 Ibid., 234.
44 Sedgwick, “Epistemology of the Closet,” 47.
45 Bakshi, “The Queer Outsider,” 182.
46 Selvadurai, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, 221.
47 Ibid., 11.
48 Ibid., 118, 151.
49 Ibid., 87.
50 Ibid., 152.
51 Ibid., 105.
52 Ibid., 10.
53 Gopinath, Unruly Visions, 92.
54 Selvadurai, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, 172.
55 Ibid., 115, 147.
56 Ibid., 110, 112, 115, 157.
57 Ibid., 145.
58 Minh-Ha, “Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism,” 248.
59 Selvadurai, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, 202.
60 Ibid., 177.
61 Ibid., 77.
62 Otalvaro-Hormillosa, “The Homeless Diaspora of Queer Asian Americans,” 115.
63 Selvadurai, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, 244.
64 Vanita and Kidwai, Same-Sex Love in India, 19-23. The ancient period of India ran from the Vedic period, 1500 B.C. to 8th century A.D. Vanita and Kidwai’s analysis helps to understand that, very similar to contemporary feminist critics Monique Wittig and Judith Butler, both the Buddhist and Hindu traditions during the period questioned the reality of gender. It is evident in the Santi Parva of the Mahabharata, a section composed under the influence of Buddhism.
65 Selvadurai, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, 245.
66 Bakshi, “The Queer Outsider,” 188.
67 Selvadurai, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, 246.
68 Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?,” 263.
69 For more information refer to Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?” and Hawley, Postcolonial, Queer: Theoretical Intersections.
70 Selvadurai, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, 125.
71 Ibid., 121.
72 Gairola, “Burning with Shame,” 309.
73 Selvadurai, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, 266.
74 Butler, “Imitation and Gender Subordination,” 309–310.
75 Selvadurai, Swimming in the Monsoon Sea, 268.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Tuli Chatterji
Dr. Tuli Chatterji is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at LaGuardia Community College, City University of New York. She received her Masters and M. Phil in English Literature from India before completing her doctorate from St. John’s University, New York. Her research interests include postcolonial literature, queer studies, and composition theory and pedagogy. Her work has been published in Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments, Journal of West Indian Literature.