Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain

Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain

Author: Susheila Nasta

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-04-20

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1403932689

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The figure of the disaporic or migrant writer has recently come to be seen as the 'Everyman' of the late modern period, a symbol of the global and the local, a cultural traveller who can traverse the national, political and ethnic boundaries of the new millennium. Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain seeks not only to place the individual works of now world famous writers such as VS Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Sam Selvon or Hanif Kureishi within a diverse tradition of im/migrant writing that has evolved in Britain since the Second World War, but also locates their work, as well as many lesser known writers such as Attia Hosain, GV Desani, Aubrey Menen, Ravinder Randhawa and Romesh Gunesekera within a historical, cultural and aesthetic framework which has its roots prior to postwar migrations and derives from long established indigenous traditions as well as colonial and post-colonial visions of 'home' and 'abroad'. Close critical readings combine with a historical and theoretical overview in this first book to chart the crucial role played by writers of South Asian origin in the belated acceptance of a literary poetics of black and Asian writing in Britain today.


India in Britain

India in Britain

Author: Susheila Nasta

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2012-11-16

Total Pages: 247

ISBN-13: 0230392725

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Moving away from orthodox narratives of the Raj and British presence in India, this book examines the significance of the networks and connections that South Asians established on British soil. Looking at the period 1858-1950, it presents readings of cultural history and points to the urgent need to open up the parameters of this field of study.


Asian Britain

Asian Britain

Author: Susheila Nasta

Publisher: Westbourne Press

Published: 2013-10

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9781908906120

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A dynamic visual history that showcases the diverse influence of Southeast Asians on contemporary British life.


Migrant Voices in Literatures in English

Migrant Voices in Literatures in English

Author: Anu Shukla

Publisher: Sarup & Sons

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 9788176257190

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Papers presented at the Second World Conference of World Association for Studies in Literatures in English, held at Nagpur in January 2004.


Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature

Music and Identity in Postcolonial British South-Asian Literature

Author: Christin Hoene

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-08-27

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1317679156

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This book examines the role of music in British-South Asian postcolonial literature, asking how music relates to the construction of postcolonial identity. It focuses on novels that explore the postcolonial condition in India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom: Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, Amit Chaudhuri's Afternoon Raag, Suhayl Saadi's Psychoraag, Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, and Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, with reference to other texts, such as E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and Vikram Seth's An Equal Music. The analyzed novels feature different kinds of music, from Indian classical to non-classical traditions, and from Western classical music to pop music and rock 'n' roll. Music is depicted as a cultural artifact and as a purely aestheticized art form at the same time. As a cultural artifact, music derives meaning from its socio-cultural context of production and serves as a frame of reference to explore postcolonial identities on their own terms. As purely aesthetic art, music escapes its contextual meaning. The transgressive qualities of music render it capable of expressing identities irrespective of origin and politics of location. Thereby, music in the novels marks a very productive space to imagine the postcolonial nation and to rewrite imperial history, to express the cultural hybridity of characters in-between nations, to analyze the state of the nation and life in the multicultural diaspora of contemporary Great Britain, and to explore the ramifications of cultural globalization versus cultural imperialism. It will be a useful research and teaching tool for those interested in postcolonial literature, music studies, cultural studies, contemporary literature and South-Asian literature.


British Asian fiction

British Asian fiction

Author: Sara Upstone

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2013-07-19

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1847797237

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This is the first text to focus solely on the writing of British writers of South Asian descent born or raised in Britain. Exploring the unique contribution of these writers, it positions their work within debates surrounding black British, diasporic, migrant, and postcolonial literature in order to foreground both the continuities and tensions embedded in their relationship to such terms, engaging in particular with the ways in which this ‘new’ generation has been denied the right to a distinctive theoretical framework through absorption into pre-existing frames of reference. Focusing on the diversity of contemporary British Asian experience, the book engages with themes including gender, national and religious identity, the reality of post-9/11 Britain, the post-ethnic self, urban belonging, generational difference and youth identities, as well as indicating how these writers manipulate genre and the novel form in support of their thematic concerns.


Cosmopolitanism and the Postnational

Cosmopolitanism and the Postnational

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2015-08-17

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9004300651

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In recent years postnational theory has become a primary tool for the analysis of European integration. Though interpretations of the concept vary, there is a wide consensus about postnationalism as a way to forge a European identity beyond a particular national history. In line with the German historical context in which this key concept was formulated in the first place, postnationalism is considered to be an adaptation of Kantian cosmopolitanism to the conditions of the modern world. This collection of essays is the first to systematically and comparatively explore the links between postnationalism and cosmopolitanism within the context of the “New Europe”. Contributors: Susana Araújo, Sibylle Baumbach, Helena Buescu, John Crosetti, Maria DiBattista, César Domínguez, Soren Frank, Birgit Mara Kaiser, Dorothy Odartey-Wellington, Maria Esteves Pereira, Karen-Margrethe Simonsen, Aysegul Turan.


Home in British Working-Class Fiction

Home in British Working-Class Fiction

Author: Nicola Wilson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-09

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1317121368

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Home in British Working-Class Fiction offers a fresh take on British working-class writing that turns away from a masculinist, work-based understanding of class in favour of home, gender, domestic labour and the family kitchen. As Nicola Wilson shows, the history of the British working classes has often been written from the outside, with observers looking into the world of the inhabitants. Here Wilson engages with the long cultural history of this gaze and asks how ’home’ is represented in the writing of authors who come from a working-class background. Her book explores the depiction of home as a key emotional and material site in working-class writing from the Edwardian period through to the early 1990s. Wilson presents new readings of classic texts, including The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Love on the Dole and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, analyzing them alongside works by authors including James Hanley, Walter Brierley, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Buchi Emecheta, Pat Barker, James Kelman and the rediscovered ’ex-mill girl novelist’ Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. Wilson's broad understanding of working-class writing allows her to incorporate figures typically ignored in this context, as she demonstrates the importance of home's role in the making and expression of class feeling and identity.


South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain

South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain

Author: Ruvani Ranasinha

Publisher: Clarendon Press

Published: 2007-02-22

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 019152591X

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South Asian Writers in Twentieth-Century Britain is the first book to provide a historical account of the publication and reception of South Asian anglophone writing from the 1930s to the present, based on original archival research drawn from a range of publishing houses. This comparison of succeeding generations of writers who emigrated to, or were born in, Britain examines how the experience of migrancy, the attitudes towards migrant writers in the literary market place, and the critical reception of them, changed significantly throughout the twentieth century. Ranasinha shows how the aesthetic, cultural, and political context changed significantly for each generation, producing radically different kinds of writing and transforming the role of the postcolonial writer of South Asian origin. The extensive use of original materials from publishers' archives shows how shifting political, academic, and commercial agendas in Britain and North America influenced the selection, content, presentation, and consumption of many of these texts. The differences between writers of different generations can thus in part be understood in terms of the different demands of their publishers and expectations of readers in each decade. Writers from different generations are paired accordingly in each chapter: Nirad Chaudhuri (1897-1999) with Tambimuttu (1915-83); Ambalavener Sivanandan (born 1923) with Kamala Markandaya (born 1924); Salman Rushdie (born 1947) with Farrukh Dhondy (born 1944); and Hanif Kureishi (born 1954) with Meera Syal (born 1963). Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand, Attia Hosain, V.S Naipaul, and Aubrey Menen are also discussed.


Global Fragments

Global Fragments

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 379

ISBN-13: 9401204225

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While the world seems to be getting ever smaller and globalization has become the ubiquitous buzz-word, regionalism and fragmentation also abound. This might be due to the fact that, far from being the alleged production of cultural homogeneity, the global is constantly re-defined and altered through the local. This tension, pervading much of contemporary culture, has an obvious special relevance for the new varieties of English and the literature published in English world-wide. Postcolonial literatures exist at the interface of English as a hegemonic medium and its many national, regional and local competitors that transform it in the new English literatures. Thus any exploration of a globalization of cultures has to take into account the fact that culture is a complex field characterized by hybridization, plurality, and difference. But while global or transnational cultures may allow for a new cosmopolitanism that produces ever-changing, fluid identities, they do not give rise to an egalitarian ‘global village’ – an asymmetry between centre and periphery remains largely intact, albeit along new parameters. The essays collected in this volume offer readings of literary, theoretical, and filmic texts from the postcolonial world. These texts are read as attempts to articulate the global with the local from a perspective of immersion in the actual diversity of life-worlds, focusing on such issues as consumption, identity-politics, and modes of affiliation. In this sense, they are global fragments: locally refractured figurations of an experience of world-wide interconnectedness.