Home and the nation: Women, citizenship and transnational migration in postcolonial literature

Abstract

This article engages with interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to globalization and migration, and argues for their rethinking through postcolonial literature. It contends that the representation of migrant women and refugees in Nadine Gordimer’s and Amitav Ghosh’s fiction shows that we need to re‐examine not only the dominant, popular ideologies of the nation as “home” and citizenship as “belonging” but also the relations between violence, citizenship, and capitalist dispossession that often drive migration.

Keywords:

• nationalism
• gender
• immigrants
• globalization
• Indian literature
• South African literature

Notes

1. I am grateful to the anonymous JPW readers for alerting me to this point.

2. Among others, see Kathrin Wagner’s Rereading Gordimer; Dorothy Driver’s balanced and thoughtful Nadine Gordimer; Karen Lazar, “Feminism as ‘Piffling’?”; for lonely praise of Gordimer’s women, see Sheila Roberts, “Nadine Gordimer’s ‘Family of Women’”.

3. For a slightly more qualified version of Lazar’s argument engaged here, see her article “Feminism as ‘Piffling’?”.