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

This special issue of South Asian Diaspora is concerned with images and narratives that circulate between, and within, diasporic locations and home(land)s. The title of the issue posits the concepts of representation and imagination as central to the relationship between South Asian diasporas and their homelands: the articles collected here investigate how representations shape the ways in which diasporas imagine themselves and, by the same token, imagine their home(land)s. The centrality of representation in the constitution of identities has long been a key concern of cultural and postcolonial studies. Edward Said (1978, 1994) and Frantz Fanon’s (1967) works, for example, have shown how dominant regimes of representation in the colonial context deeply influenced the ways in which members of the colonial societies imagined themselves in relationship to the Other, and they also revealed the devastating impact of this otherisation on the colonised subject. The question of representation, Said argued, is essentially a political issue, one that should be understood in a context that is ‘primarily imperial’ (1994, 66). Indeed, imperial and colonial relations have had a profound impact on the development of colonial and postcolonial cultures, and they still cannot be understood outside of these relations.

The political nature of the question of representation was also fully discussed by Stuart Hall who, writing about the Black British struggle for representation of the 1980s, noted how it ‘was predicated on a critique of the degree of fetishization, objectification, and negative figuration which are so much feature of the representation of the black subject’ (1996, 164). Stuart Hall’s critique was not limited to addressing the derogatory nature of these representations, but, drawing upon Foucault, he specifically tackled the issue, raised before him by Fanon and Said, of the nexus between power and knowledge, noting how ‘every regime of representation is a regime of power’ (1990, 224–225). Representation is understood by Hall not as a mere description, but as a constitutive element of culture and of cultural identity, which is why he framed the struggle for representation of the time within a political struggle over the legacy of colonial and imperial categories imposed on the diasporic population of Black Britain. Indeed, as Rushdie wrote, ‘description is itself a political act […] so it is clear that redescribing a world is the necessary first step towards changing it’ (1992, 13–14).

At the time of writing this introduction, the question of representation has been firmly placed at the centre of a global debate around justice and the regime of power that is embedded in narratives about race and national identity in contemporary cultures. The protests of the Black Lives Matter movement around the world have in fact exposed once again the essentially political nature of the question of representation. The transnational call for the removal of statues and monuments that celebrate actors and events of the colonial past upon which present-day western societies are based actively questions, and challenges, the legacy of imperialism on national cultures. Further, the movement has brought to the spotlight the exclusionary nature of narratives upon which national identities are imagined, undermining their supposedly stable character by giving space to ‘competing versions of narrative, memory and history’ (Julien and Mercer 1988, 2).

This special issue focuses on representations precisely because the terrain of representation is the terrain of struggle over cultural hegemony, which points towards the instable nature of cultural identities. Cultural identities, rather than being fixed, immutable essences, depend upon the versions of narrative and of memories they are based on. Following Hall, identities are ‘subjected to the continuous “play” of history, culture and power’ (1990, 225) and they depend upon the ways in which ‘we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past’ (225). Hall’s argument is critical for us because it points to the instability of official notions of history itself, which, as Bhabha put it, often marginalises all other stories, especially those of minority groups (Bhabha 1990). Moreover, approaching the past as narrative introduces the second concept upon which this issue is based, which is the key role of imagination in the shaping of identities.

That imagination plays a key role in the positioning of community identities was eloquently pointed out by Benedict Anderson who, in his acclaimed book Imagined Communities (1991), posited that it is the ways in which community are imagined, rather than their inherent ‘falsity/genuineness’ the criteria upon which we should distinguish between communities (6). Following up on Anderson’s work, Appadurai’s research on the interplay between mass migration and mass media suggests that imagination now more than ever plays a central role in the production of local subjectivities. Appadurai talks about imagination as a ‘social practice’ (1996, 31), for in a world characterised by mass migration and electronic media, these two forces ‘seem to impel (and sometimes compel) the work of imagination’ (1996, 4). Electronic media offer people a plethora of resources for imagining futures, alternative lives in different countries, but, especially for people in motion, what they offer are new resources for imagining the past. The immediate access to images and narratives (fictional or not) of a country of origin, as well as narrative of distant and near pasts, which is facilitated by electronic media, plays now ‘a critical role in the creation of the migrant archive’ (Appadurai 2016). But, Appadurai cautions,

nor is this only a consumer relationship, for in the age of the Internet, literate migrants have begun to explore social media, chat rooms and other interactive spaces in which to find, debate and consolidate their own memory traces and stories into a more widely plausible narrative. (2016).

What this suggests is once again the centrality of representations in the shaping of diasporic identities, their ability to mediate between temporal and spatial distances, triggering the ability to imagine one’s own position in relation to past narratives and memories. Indeed, as Avtar Brah wrote, ‘the concept of diaspora delineates a field of identifications where “imagined communities” are forged within and out of a confluence of narratives from annals of collective memory and re-memory’ (1996, 196).

The articles collected in this special issue address the interplay between representations, imagination and identities by focusing specifically on the South Asian diasporic experience. The history of South Asia is marked by centuries of movement, migration and resettlement, so even though diasporas are often upheld as symbols of vibrant hybrid cosmopolitan cultures (Mannur and Sahni 2011), they are also repositories of memories of home/lands often grounded in (imaginary) myths of unity and essence, to the point that they can become also ‘bastions of reactionary thinking and fascist rememorations’ (Mishra 2007, 17). South Asian diaspora communities are also, in many cases, marked by the violent histories of the subcontinent (as seen during the Partition of 1947, various episodes of communal violence, civil wars) and the memories of these events showcase the ‘haunting quality’ (Whitehead 2004) of traumatic experiences, making the past being constantly articulated in the present.

The diasporic space has been explored extensively in films and literature – narratives of diaspora stemming from diasporic authors as well as from South Asian-based authors. In the first case diasporas have been often analysed using the Bhabhian concepts of liminality, third space and hybridity (1994). On the other hand, narratives of diaspora from the subcontinent, as seen in the case of Hindi popular cinema for example, tell a very different story and generally relate back to the internal social and political vicissitudes of India (Mehta 2005; Mishra 2002; Uberoi 1998).

By looking at the ways in which films, literature, photography and social media construct images of homelands and diasporas, as well as the ways in which they facilitate exchanges between them, in this special issue we propose to open up a dialogue between these representations and to analyse how they are constructed, disseminated, appropriated and/or challenged in relation to recent political developments in South Asia and in the diaspora. In this special issue, which consists of seven articles, we thus propose to explore the ways in which different authors create narratives of diaspora and homeland through different representational practices (films, photography, literature, social media etc.) and to investigate people’s engagement with such narratives.

We begin this special issue with articles discussing diasporic representations in cultural forms such as cinema and literature. Two articles here are concerned with the films of British Asian director Gurinder Chadha – one of the most important and influential diasporic filmmakers of the past three decades, and the most prominent woman filmmaker of South Asian descent in Britain. Since her first short documentary I am British, But …  (1989) Chadha in her films has always addressed a number of critical issues in the discussions on diasporic subjectivities, such as racism, multiculturalism, interracial relations, gender, generational differences and, especially in her latest works, colonialism and heritage. She therefore remains an important staple in diasporic filmmaking, as her films offer a glimpse into British Asian life and raise critical questions regarding the changing notion of Britishness and the legacy of colonialism in British society. Iulia Rășcanu in her article ‘Who is Afraid of Hybridity? Re-visiting Bhaji on the Beach and Perspectives on Multiculturalism in Britain’ takes a fresh look at Chadha’s very first feature film – Bhaji on the Beach (1993), which was also the first film directed by a woman of South Asian heritage in Britain (Street 1997, 102). While Bhaji on the Beach is often seen as celebratory of multiculturalism and hybridity, Rășcanu’s article interrogates these assumptions by providing an alternative reading of the film through Bakhtin’s conceptual framework of heteroglossia, centripetal and centrifugal forces. After analysing the film’s various spatial configurations, interactions between characters and their cultural essences, Rășcanu argues that rather than simply celebrating hybridity Gurinder Chadha embraces a possibility – of a more open-ended and more fused society.

Where Rășcanu discusses Chadha’s first film, Clelia Clini, on the other hand, analyses Viceroy’s House (2017), one of the latest films by the same director. Released on the 70th anniversary of the Partition between India and Pakistan, and stylistically constructed in the fashion of British heritage cinema, the film focuses on the final days of the British Raj. In her article ‘Diasporic Visions: Colonialism, Nostalgia and the Empire in Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House’, Clini analyses the film’s representation of the British empire and discusses Chadha’s own stated aim of offering a ‘British Asian perspective’ on Partition. By focusing on the interplay between Partition, diaspora and the representation of the imperial past, Clini argues that while the film, being the first feature film on Partition made by a British Asian woman, has the potential to unsettle traditional representations of the empire offered by heritage films, its glamorous depiction of the British rulers ultimately hinders its ability to subvert the ideology that underpins heritage cinema and instead feeds into the contemporary wave of colonial nostalgia in Britain.

The relationship between past and present, and especially the historical memory of traumatic events, is also the major concern of Deimantas Valančiūnas’s article ‘Haunting Memories: Sri Lankan Civil War, Trauma and Diaspora in Literature and Film’. In this article Valančiūnas investigates the recent literary and cinematographic engagement with the Sri Lankan civil war – one of the most violent conflicts in contemporary South Asia. In the article he analyses how two forms of different cultural production, Sri Lankan – American author’s V.V. Ganeshananthan’s novel Love Marriage (2008) and French filmmaker’s Jaques Audiard’s film Dheepan (2015) hailing from different cultural backgrounds and experiences, explore and discuss the traumatic legacies of Sri Lankan civil war in the diasporic space. Valančiūnas argues that the novel and the film function as trauma narratives which insist on the haunting quality of war-related memories and experiences, emphasising trauma’s transnational and transhistorical aspect, as it continues to possess its subjects no matter of where they come from or where they are born.

As our special issue moves away from the analysis of literary and cinematographic narratives into the exploration of diasporic engagements with other mediated forms of representation, memory remains a key aspect in the article ‘The Days of Plenty: Images of First Generation Malayali Migrants in the Arabian Gulf’ by Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil. Drawing on Tina Campt’s idea of the ‘quiet reading’ (2017), in this article Karinkurayil investigates photographs of South Indian migrant workers in the Gulf from the late 1970s to 1980s. In his analysis, Karinkurayil approaches migrant memory as a resource that not only allows us to recreate and re-imagine the lived experience of early migrants through their photographs, but also enables us to see the Gulf as a place of intertwined memories and aspirations. In this complex space, migrants emerge as active negotiators of their place of destination, challenging the popular associations of labour migration with ghettoisation and despair.

Maintaining the focus on the diasporic engagement with forms of representations, the three following articles in this special issue investigate diasporic representations within the virtual and electronic space of the Internet. As mentioned previously, the Internet, digital media and social networks have become enormously significant for migrants and diasporic communities, as they allow them to forge connections between, and within, diasporic spaces and their homelands (Fortunati, Pertierra, and Vincent 2012). The two articles address in particular the intersection between diaspora’s virtual spaces, and religion, as the conceptual questions of ‘religious diaspora’ and ‘diasporic religions’ (Johnson 2012) continue to be an important part of diaspora studies.

Despite Jainism being a religious tradition with very strong ties to the South Asian subcontinent, Jains, however, have historically been involved in numerous transnational trade networks, forming diasporic communities in a number of different countries. Over the past decades, the internet and other forms of digital media have become an important arena to imagine, construct, and share the diasporic experience – both for members of the diasporic community and for Jains living in India. Therefore, Tine Vekemans, in the article ‘Lost and Found, Centre and Periphery. Narratives of the Jain Diasporic Experience Online’, investigates the Jain diasporic experience through online narratives. Drawing on the data collected during her 2014–2019 fieldwork in Belgium, the UK, the U.S.A. and India, as well as on online material from more than 400 webpages, Vekemans argues that the Jain diasporic experience and the significance of religion in the diasporic space are constantly contested and negotiated, both online and offline. Even though Jains living outside India are considered an important target audience amongst web content creators in India, the Jain diaspora is, however, also very actively engaged in producing digital content. This allows Vekemans to develop the idea of global Jainism, where diasporic communities could create an alternative centre for Jain philosophy and innovation.

Religion, diaspora and the homeland are linked not only in terms of religious practices but also in the political arena. The current rise of nationalist movements both in South Asia and abroad has, in stark contrast with the European multicultural dream of the late 1990s, resurrected myths of pure, essential identities and brought about a backlash against multiculturalism (Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010), that inevitably affects ways of imagining home and belonging, both in the diaspora and the homeland. This idea is explored by Sabita Manian and Brad Bullock in their article ‘Indo-Caribbean Diaspora, Foreign Policy, and Iterations of Hindu Identity’, where they take a closer look at the spread of pan-Hindu identity and the ways ‘Hinduness’ is reproduced, managed, and sustained transnationally. By taking Guyana as a case point, Manian and Bullock investigate how the current BJP – Hindu nationalist government in India and their Hindutva ideology influence the Indian diaspora in the Caribbean and the articulation of local Hindu identities through various vernacular Hindu organisations (such as Hindu Swayamsewak Sangh and the Guyana Central Arya Samaj). Manian and Bullock’s article showcases the point of interdependency between the homeland and the diaspora: as the authors argue, the diaspora needs their homeland to sustain its memories and heritage while the homeland, in turn, can manipulate diasporic needs to advance its own foreign-policy agendas.

Finally, social media and online youth organisations is a case study of the third article ‘Negotiating Identity in the Diaspora: The Role of South Asian Youth Organizations’ by Ajaya K. Sahoo and Anindita Shome. In their article, Sahoo and Shome explore how youth organisations in the U.S.A. creatively use virtual spaces to negotiate and reaffirm diasporic identities. By focusing on four South Asian youth organisations in the U.S.A. (e.g. Improving South Asian American Students’ Experiences (ISAASE), South Asian Youth Action (SAYA) and South Asian Youth in Houston Unite (SAYHU)), Sahoo and Shome’s analysis highlights how these organisations use social media to make space for the South Asian youth, as they provide a platform for sharing information about various cultural and educational events, employ the online hashtags in Twitter to raise awareness on subtle issues and also create blogs focused on various projects where South Asian youth could take part. They argue that these online spaces replace traditional youth activities and act as powerful tools to implement participants’ agency by not only providing South Asian diasporic youth with a concise information and debates regarding essential issues such as immigration laws or possibilities and barriers for education and workplace, but also by creating a space to discuss and rethink religion, ethnicity and gender.

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).