Indian Writers: Transnationalisms and Diasporas Book

This anthology attempts to locate diasporic voices in the interstitial spaces of countless ideologies. It is a critical examination of dislocated diasporic subjects, some who have adjusted to the dislocation well, those who have chosen the hybrid spaces for empowerment, others who are dragged forcefully to various territories, and yet some who gleefully inhabit trans-local spaces. The range of voices is therefore wide, and the critical questions that arise are: How do we read these voices? How are the voices received in various locations? Are these voices considered Indian? Do they represent Indianness, or some hybridized version of it? What is an authentic cultural identity? What, ultimately, is Indianness, or for that matter, any hard won national or ethnic identity?

Additionally, and more importantly perhaps, as more and more female writers are being read, both in the global south and in the north, the reception of these texts, particularly in an era of globalization, and in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack in the United States of America, raises questions on how the 'other', the subaltern, is represented and read.

Some writers use an assimilation approach to the cultures of the West to such a degree that they find Indian culture monolithically oppressive, while others continue to romanticize Indianness, yet others eroticize and ethnicize the east for western consumption. The collection of essays in this anthology looks at contemporary debates in postcolonial and transnational literary criticism in an attempt to understand the often complex and hybrid narratives of the diasporic Indian.

The anthology opens with a creative personal narrative on the dialectics ofdislocation. In our attempt to include the author's voice, Jaspal Kaur Singh analyses the themes of the text from a reflective paradigm through a narration of her own and her family's journey - one that traverses Burma, Pakistan, India, Iraq and the United States. Singh's search for her identity is intertwined with her own constructions of the notions of space, location, movement, exile, culture, conflict and sexuality.