Introduction: race relations and the South Asian diasporic imaginary

ABSTRACT

In today’s western multicultural societies, Eurocentric notions of ‘black’ and ‘white’ have polarised the debate about racial relations and effaced the complexities of interaction between South Asian migrant communities and people of other ethnic and racial backgrounds. This special issue is geared toward exploring how the complexity of contemporary race relations between the South Asian and the African communities, as well as its legacy in Africa, the Caribbean, and the India Ocean, find expression through literary and cultural narratives. Engaging with a variety of colonial and postcolonial contexts – namely Mauritius, South Africa, Bengal, Barbados, Kenya, and Trinidad – our contributors attempt to address gaps in the exploration of race relations from within the South Asian diasporic imaginary and to understand race relations in the context of British colonial-capitalist expansion and of its postcolonial and global inflections.

KEYWORDS:

• Race relations
• South Asian diasporic imaginary
• India
• East and South Africa
• Caribbean
• Mauritius

Notes on contributors

Delphine Munos is a Humboldt researcher at the Institute for English and American Studies, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, where she is working on a postdoctoral project focusing on narratology and contemporary minority/postcolonial literatures. She has published in the field of postcolonial literatures and South Asian literatures in English. She is the author of a monograph on Jhumpa Lahiri titled After Melancholia (Brill, ex-Rodopi, 2013) and the co-editor of special issues for South Asian Diaspora and Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her research interests include memory studies, narratology, postcolonial/minority literatures, as well as South Asian studies and literatures in English.

Mala Pandurang is Head of the English Department, Dr BMN College, Mumbai. She was a postdoctoral fellow of the AvH Foundation at the University of Magdeburg, Germany. She subsequently received five short research-grant visits to Germany. She taught as Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and is also a recipient of the Charles Wallace In-UK Research grant. She is the Reviews Editor of the Journal of South Asian Diaspora (Routledge, UK) and has co-edited two special issues of the journal. Her areas of research are diaspora theory and gender studies and she has published extensively on the same.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.