Alexander Simone A. James: ‘Two Bo-rat can’t live in the same hole’: Revis(ion)ing Indo-Caribbean Female Subjectivity

1Providing a clear-sighted analysis of the absence of Indian women in postcolonial discourse, Verene A. Shepherd points to the widely accepted belief that Indian women ‘functioned largely in the private, domestic sphere, under the control of Indian men in the patriarchal Indian family system; that they were subsumed to their male counterparts in the economic and social spheres and did not merit separate treatment in the historiography’ (234). Indo-Trinidadian author, Ramabai Espinet, in her debut novel, The Swinging Bridge, addresses this neglect. Offering a much broader perspective of Indian women’s reality, while according them the status of speaking subjects, Espinet engenders resistance in her female subjects. Unearthing Indian female subjects from oblivion necessitates that the novel’s protagonist, film researcher, Mona Singh, perform an excavation of sorts. Hence, in exhuming the women in her family whose lives are shrouded in silence and secrecy, Mona engages a politics of resistance, captured in the idiom ‘two-bo rat can’t live in the same hole’. Of noted relevance, this idiom is appropriated from the masculinist discourse. Reinforcing patriarchal rule and order under his roof, this phrase, during the ‘big row’, was uttered as an ultimatum to her brother, Kello, by their father, Da-Da. Mona narrates that the ‘big row’ had transformed Kello into a man ‘even though he was only nine years old at the time’. Appropriating this highly-charged masculinist narrative to script a narrative of her own, Mona defies and defiles patriarchal and cultural expectations of Indian womanhood, of female subjectivity and sexuality. This essay chronicles Mona’s revision and reappropriation of the master narrative. Further, it demonstrates how she renegotiates Indian women’s subjectivity by refuting the patriarchal construct of the ‘fallen woman’ (the binary of entrapment), widow or whore, accorded the Indian woman who dares to defy male authority.

Ashok Savitri: Anamnesis andAmnesia: Salman Rushdie’s Imagination in The Moor’s Last Sigh

2In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie reimagines and redesigns the cultural space of the Indian nation, interweaving dissident stories and dissonant histories. Disenchanted by the version of nationhood projected by fundamentalist-religious politicians of the nineteen nineties, he writes other versions of India from the nation’s others. One such other is Rushdie’s protagonist, the Moor. The deep conflict between writers and politicians in their respective imaginings of their nation becomes clear, as the Moor plumbs the depths of his past in a fiercely anamnestic story-telling, while the nationalist-politician in the novel uses amnesiac history to exclude ‘foreigners’. What becomes clear in this retelling of history is the inevitability of a deep conflict between writers and politicians in their respective imaginings of their nations. Rushdie’s protagonist—the Moor— creature of artistic fabulation and himself a fabulator, teller of tales and weaver/inter-weaver of texts, peels the layers of history and plumbs his past in anamnestic stories, and simultaneously lays bare the lies inhering in the religious-nationalist rhetoric of the politician and shows it for what it is: another narrative of the nation and an amnesiac one. Outsider, freak of nature, narrating voice and, in effect, a disguised and distorted emblem of artistic imagination, the Moor contests nationalist politics and its history and reimagines his nation. Consequently, to read the narrative of The Moor’s Last Sigh is to read the nation anew and move emphatically from an imagined unity to a reimagined heterogeneity.

Bragard Véronique: « Divali ne fut jamais plus beau de tant d’océans franchis »: Coolitude et métissage dans la poésie de Khal Torabully

3En reprenant l’image du marin en voyage, comme ses ancêtres coolies au début du siècle, l’écrivain Mauricien Khal Torabully révèle combien le poète mais aussi l’être humain est un éternel nomade en quête de sens, du beau et de formes d’expression. Si Khal Torabully a théorisé la coolitude, ce sont ses ouvrages poétiques qui expriment le mieux sa vision prophétique et thérapeutique du passé à travers un investissement affectif de l’espace océanique. La dé-route du coolie, revisitée de manière créatrice et symbolique, est exprimée par un code de l’étrangeté, de la densité et de la subversion. Il déroute à son tour le lecteur et défie les monolithismes langagiers. Ses ouvrages postulent plus qu’une entité indianocéanique, ils créent des ponts entre régions, communautés et continents et plus particulièrement avec les Antilles. Cet article se propose de voyager au gré des thèmes et mouvements de style de deux de ses recueils, à savoir Cale d’étoiles, Coolitude (1992) et Chair corail, fragments coolies (2000) et d’y analyser les mé-tissages poétiques de ces œuvres qui visent à dépasser une relation fusionnelle, idéalisée avec l’Inde. Une analyse textuelle met l’emphase sur la dynamique reliant la massalafication identitaire à celle des mots et de la nouvelle parole éclatée et recréée par le poète.

Cabaret Florence: Diasporic Variations on India in The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri (2004) and Mira Nair’s Filmic Adaptation of the Novel (2007)

4Confronting Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2004) and Mira Nair’s filmic adaptation of the novel in 2007, this article analyses the similarities and variations between the representations of India seen through the eyes of those two ‘Indian Artists living in the US’. Indeed, in spite of a common focus on a depiction of India as a place of origins for Indian American migrants, I explain how and why the novel elects the second-generation characters as its prime focalizers, while the film favours the second generation’s viewpoint. Yet, both works appear to join in the same desire to show that these two generations’ perceptions of India are essentially fantasized, which enables to reflect on the various means used by a novel and a film to stage such a reconstructed country. But, the obvious interest for cultural and family representations of India should not prevent us from taking into account the more historical picture that is drawn of India, even though this picture may seem to remain in the wings of each work. However unobtrusive it may be, such a more political vision raises the question of the repressed threat, which is embodied by a seemingly harmless Hindu India in a post 9/11 American world.

Chastagner Claude: When Bhangra Meets Hip-hop: Articulating Hybridity on American Soil

5The purpose of this paper is to explore the specificity of bhangra music on American soil. Taking the case of the band American Bhangra, it examines the way African-American idioms like rap have been incorporated into South Asian music. This paper claims that rather than merely adapting to and borrowing from American popular culture, musicians of Indian origin redefine it on their own terms. The challenge for the Asian community is then to generate artistic forms of sufficient organic hybridity to lead to future developments.

Croisy Sophie: Unveiling Everyday Traumas: Migrations in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night

6This essay on Shani Mootoo’s text Cereus Blooms at Night seeks to bring forth the characteristics and causes of cultural trauma in a displaced family, the Ramchandin family, which migrated from India in order to escape their karmic destiny as indentured servants. Their departure from the homeland and arrival on the imaginary Caribbean island of Lantanacamara turns out to be the original traumatic event that will haunt two generations of Ramchandin children who will have to bear the weight of acculturation and mental corruption after confrontations with the colonial system in place on the island. This essay is about the difficult struggle against a web of colonial regulations which deny any possibility for individual and collective improvement (be it personal, cultural, or social) in a place satiated with colonial fanaticism; but in the end, it opens a window towards potential opportunities for healing and rising again beyond the forces of oppression, and despite the violence of the fall.

R. Cudjoe Selwyn: Modes of Indian Literature in the Diaspora: Trinidad and Tobago

7When the Indian indentured laborers came to Trinidad (1845- 1917) they brought with them their own ways of seeing the world; their various religious texts; their drama and other aspects of their literary heritage. The Hindus brought their three great Holy texts (the Bhagwat Puran, the Ramayana and the Bhagwat Gita) whereas the Muslims brought their hosay, a passion play that re-enacted the death of Hussan and Hossein; a theatrical form that was analogous to the ramleelas and the calypso/carnival that Africans brought from West Africa. This paper examines how these forms of open-air theatre challenged Western ways of thinking about drama (as enunciated in Aristotle’s Poetics); how the ramleelas (an adaptation of the Ramayana) were practiced in Trinidad; and how the sentiments and sensibilities of the Ramayana structured the works of novelists such as V.S. Naipaul (for example, in A House for Mr. Biswas). In short, my paper argues that the Indian literary tradition reflected Indian nationalist aspiration; consolidated their emerging position in the society; and literally kept them alive as the dominant society sought to negate their personhood. Any analysis of the literature of the diaspora ought to pay attention to how these ancient traditions were adapted to their new societies and how, in the process, they constructed a new being in the New World.

Draga Alexandru Maria-Sabina: Provincialising London in Vikram Chandra’s Novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain

8In Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Sanjay Parasher, a nineteenth-century Brahmin reincarnated as a monkey who, like Scheherazade, must tell stories to prolong his life, keeps ‘going to London’—in his dreams and in real life—in search for a political and discursive centre but, ultimately, for his own identity. London, the empire’s centre, becomes an imaginary space that must be conquered by the emerging Indian national consciousness, whose reading of it differs from the imperial power discourse.

9The chapter ‘In London, a Battle between Immortals’ marks the climax of the protagonist’s journey through his life in colonial India and provides an X-ray of underground London that reveals the hidden, repressed face of power. By solving the detective mystery of this chapter, Sanjay provides a rereading of the urban text—and of the novelistic discourse itself—through a different lens, which dethrones the exemplary value of the metropolis and opens it up to an alternative, ‘other’ discourse. I will show this by analysing the textuality of this chapter from a perspective informed mainly by Dipesh Chakrabarty’s project of ‘provincialising Europe’ and Barthes’ and Derrida’s alternative views of the centre in discourse and the free play of textuality.

Fu Chun: The (Im)possibility of Backtracking in M. G. Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall

10Unlike V. S. Naipaul whose infamous renunciation of the past in A Bend in the River, M. G. Vassanji’s decolonization story emphasizes the importance of the past. Given Vassanji’s diaspora experience, this paper underscores the notion of ‘other Asians’ expounded by Gayatri Spivak to crack wider the diaspora interstice. ‘In-between’, pregnant with meanings, bespeaks para-sites (without negative implication), which in turn suggest proximities of both places so much so that this unique intermediary spot pushes outward within the niche. In other words, the Indian diaspora’s imagination endows the real with a material base to substantiation. In-between the past and the present, thus, has less to do with the existential blight Vik Lall and his peers experience than with diaspora trajectories in the future. To better understand it in botanical terms, the deeper the roots delve, the lusher and more exuberant the diaspora foliage is. ‘The (im) possibility of backtracking in The In-Between World of Vikram Lall’ contends that the past is a necessary evil.

Garcia Mar: La colonie pénitentiaire: lecture post-exotique de Soupir d’Ananda Devi

11Le rapport que les narrateurs postcoloniaux entretiennent avec l’exotisme est, le plus souvent, passé sous silence par la critique. Tout se passe comme si l’exotisme, moteur de l’écriture coloniale et des premiers romans ethnographiques, était incompatible avec le statut contestataire de l’auteur postcolonial. Or, souvent exilé ou formé en Occident, l’auteur postcolonial promène un regard de plus en plus étranger sur ses origines en raison de son nomadisme esthétique, culturel et intellectuel. Dans leur recherche d’un lieu de parole qui permette d’articuler l’expérience du local et celle du global, les auteurs postcoloniaux sont par conséquent confrontés d’une manière ou d’une autre aux clichés et aux stéréotypes qui circulent sur leur (s) culture (s). L’œuvre d’Ananda Devi pose avec acuité la question de la place de l’exotisme (Affergan 1987, Moura 1998, 2002, Forsdick 2005) et de la stéréotypie (Amossy 1982, 1991) dans les littératures émergentes. Dans ce travail, nous procéderons à une étude des composantes formelles et thématiques d’un nouvel espace d’écriture, que nous nommons postexotique (Volodine) dans Soupir d’Ananda Devi. Nous montrerons que, tout en se servant des stéréotypes établis, cet espace d’écriture se propose de les démonter pour se construire à partir d’une relecture des lieux communs liés à l’insularité comme refuge et aux connotations édéniques liées aux îles. Un examen approfondi des stratégies de renversement des stéréotypes— ironie, parodie, dérision—et de réappropriation de l’exotisme mettra en évidence leur rôle fondamental dans la construction de la nouvelle identité littéraire insulaire proposée par Devi.

Harrington Louise: An-Other Space: Diasporic Responses to Partition in Bengal

12The creative responses to the Partition of India fall largely into two camps, that of and from the pre-Independence regions of Punjab on the one hand and Bengal on the other. This paper focuses on diasporic creative responses to the latter, which is often silent and silenced on the events of Partition and its aftermath. In Bengal/Bangladesh, many of the creative responses to Partition have been intrinsically and dynamically influenced by the 1971 War of Independence, which is essentially knotted with the earlier partitions of Bengal and is justifiably considered to be more an anniversary of independence in Bangladesh than 1947 is. Under discussion then will be Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines and Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age, and the film The Clay Bird directed by Tareque Masud as they have responded to the less popular, other aspects of Partition, such as the 1964 riots and the 1971 War, and told stories from an-Other space. It becomes clear that the diasporic space from which these works come goes hand in hand with the liminal geographical location of the eastern side of Partition.

Lauret Sabine: The Going Home Syndrome in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

13Born in Dhaka and educated in England, Monica Ali writes from what Homi K. Bhabha defined as an interstitial space in The Location of Culture. In her debut novel, Brick Lane (2003), Nazneen, a young Bangladeshi girl is married off to Chanu, a man nearly twice her age who tries to be a ‘Big Man’ in London. She does not speak English and knows nothing of the city. Images of the Golden Bengal collide with the bricks of Bangla Town. Through Nazneen’s eyes, the reader witnesses the shaping of a multicultural community in a context of social and racial unrest. This paper aims at showing how Monica Ali challenges the notion of belonging. She illustrates with her different characters how the diasporic prism distorts reality. The account she gives of the immigrants’ life is moving and exposes the paradox of the yearning for the home country. What is it to be home? What does it mean to go back home when home is a country you have never seen before? The métissage of a new identity thus implies the creation of an ‘imaginary homeland’ to use Rushdie’s words, or rather of an imaginary borderland.

Magdelaine-Andrianjafitrimo Valérie: Écriture ethnographique et imagination diasporique dans les romans de l’engagisme indien (La Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique)

14Les romans de l’engagisme indien dans les anciennes colonies françaises, aujourd’hui départements d’outre-mer (La Réunion, Guadeloupe, Martinique), sont oubliés des études sur la diaspora indienne. Parus à des dates relativement récentes après un long silence des descendants d’engagés, ils permettent pourtant de voir se construire une imagination diasporique. Ils montrent en effet, dans des formes hybrides parfois indigestes, l’obsession de fournir un savoir ethnographique et historique sur la traversée et l’implantation des engagés et de leurs descendants. Cette surenchère informative témoigne d’un désir de restituer une histoire dont on sait, en réalité, qu’elle a largement été perdue et oubliée. Cette mémoire fictionalisée, reconstruite par le biais d’une poétique de l’exhaustivité, pourrait signifier que l’imagination diasporique mise en œuvre par ces textes est nostalgique. En fait, ces romans ont pour objectif de convertir l’indianité restaurée par et dans l’espace textuel, en une composante majeure de la créolisation. L’imagination diasporique permet de faire le deuil de l’Inde et d’en montrer la participation au fonctionnement même des îles créoles. Le roman ethnographique demeure toutefois ambigu. Peu lu, il risque de rester lettre morte bien qu’il remplisse le rôle symbolique d’un tombeau qui commémore des ancêtres oubliés et les enracine dans leur nouvelle terre.

Mehta Binita: Bhaji, Curry, and Masala: Food and/as Identity in Four Films of the Indian Diaspora

15This essay studies the connections between food (as material object and metaphor) and identity and investigates the representation of the Indian diaspora in films from four countries and two continents: Srinivas Krishna’s Masala (Canada, 1991) and Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala (US, 1991) in North America; Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach (UK, 1993) and Vijay Singh’s One Dollar Curry (France, 2004) in Europe. The paper conducts a comparative analysis of the films, exploring the variations in the representation of the identities of Indians in films set in Europe and North America, i.e. the US and Canada. It examines how the masala of Nair’s Mississippi Masala is different from the masala of Krishna’s Masala. It examines how the films recreate the homeland or reject the recreation of the homeland in the diaspora. It questions if the food and spices in the films’ titles are mere marketing tools, a link to the homeland, or potent metaphors that describe the mixtures, the blending, the in-betweenness, the hybridization of the Indian diasporic characters in the films. Finally, it analyzes how the historical, political, and socio-cultural contexts of the adopted home influence the identity formation and assimilation of Indian diasporic migrants in the films.

Mishra Vijay: ‘In the arcade of Hanuman House’: Ghostly Spectres in the Diaspora

16Diasporas are shadowed by ghostly spectres and every diaspora has its own narrative of these spectres. The paper returns to the earlier theorization of the diasporic imaginary, and uses key texts from the V. S. Naipaul corpus to re-think the links between diaspora, memory and the power of colonial discourses. The argument centres around a canonical passage from V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas which is used to open up traces in Naipaul often overlooked by postcolonial readings of the writer. If colonial English curriculum informs Naipaul’s discourse and shadows it, food and film (here Bombay/Bollywood cinema) take us to plantation diaspora life-worlds, which form the background to many of his novels. Naipaul’s phrase ‘in the arcade of Hanuman House’ functions as a metaphor for the space of the diaspora in which Bollywood films and plantation food are consumed and ‘celebrated’, as well as a code for a specific plantation diaspora literary discourse which locates itself ambivalently in the cusp of the colonial/postcolonial divide.

Moïse Myriam: The Diasporic Gendered Subject In and OUT of Space in Lakshmi Persaud’s Butterfly in theWind and Sastra

17Lakshmi Persaud’s first two novels, Butterfly in the Wind (1990) and Sastra (1993) symbolize the growth of Indo-Caribbean women’s writing in terms of self-representing a gendered minority group and its specific historical past. Both deal with the life of two young Indian women, bound to face their destinies and to take the responsibility for their choices. The Indo-Trinidadian woman has indeed inherited from a double alienation through her belonging to the Indian minority amongst the Caribbean as well as to the indentured patriarchal society. This duality can be perceived through her specific relation to space and displacement, through inward and outward movements which are thus emphasized in this article in terms of cultural change, of progress from innocence to maturity and from cultural and religious traditions to modernity and education. The paper analyzes the authorial manipulations and seeks to demonstrate to what extent Persaud author-izes her two protagonists to move from voicelessness to self-assertion. The discussion also considers this ‘in-between space’ that Homi K. Bhabha urges us to consider, the Third space, not one based on exoticism or multiculturalism but on hybridity. It serves to enhance the unspeakable and the unspoken, demonstrating whether the diasporic Indo-Caribbean voice is eventually silenced or freed and whether the diasporic journey is one of salvation or of destruction for the diasporic female subject.

Mukherji Pia: Desigirls@blogspot.com: South Asian Cyberlogs and the Postfeminist Debate

18This paper examines feminist South Asian weblogs with a focus on representative platforms and personas. Specifically, it notices how conventional narratives of sexuality, maternity, and everyday politics are reappropriated in mommy blogs and ‘chick lit’ confessionals in popular cyberlogs from London, Bombay, Delhi, and Illinois: Em - The Compulsive Confessor, The Accidental Momma, and??! - This is a Title. Such electronic diaries will be studied in relation to the gender politics of journal writing as a feminist strategy, as well as forums that introduce the question of ‘embodiment’ in virtual space—and illustrate how negotiations with the gendered body in discourses of sexuality, reproduction, or illness play out in insubstantial episodes of cyber talk. In addition, we will consider postmodern stylistic issues of performance, authenticity, anonymity, within network dispersals and virtual simulations of subject and form.

19In this context, the paper examines the possible emergence of a differentiated ‘postfeminist’ politics in a specific diasporic forum. Do such cyber practices, in fact, facilitate pluralistic feminisms? Do they address the needs of marginalized agendas? In short, does the cyborg diaspora initiate a civil exchange or a postfeminist debate?

Pesso-Miquel Catherine: Unseen Cities: Representations of the Diasporic Experience in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers

20Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004) describes the diasporic experience of Pakistani characters in an English city always designated by the Urdu name which the immigrants have given it, ‘Dasht-e-Tanhaii’ (the wilderness of loneliness). The analysis in this paper focuses first on Aslam’s representation of the immigrants’ alienation, and on the mutual ‘invisibility’ of Britons and migrants, before concentrating on the fact that Aslam veers away from the traditional dichotomies of post-colonial criticism to foreground the inner dissensions of the diasporic community, structured along lines of class, generation, religion and gender. The last section is devoted to Aslam’s use of language, and more specifically his dense, highly metaphorical poetic prose, which lovingly dwells on representations of nature within the bleak industrial city where the story is set. In a brutal, repressive universe where tribal codes of male honour prevail, where lovers are ruthlessly doomed, Aslam attempts to map the contours of the city’s natural spaces, concentrating with scientific precision on fauna and flora. Those microscopic and beautiful details come to constitute subversive objective correlatives, pointing to the tragic vulnerability of freedom, life and desire.

Saleh Zeenat: Mississippi Masala:ACase study in Forced Hybridity

21Mississippi Masala, Mira Nair’s second feature film reflects the artist’s obsessive questioning of in-betweenness. The main character Mina describes herself as a ‘masala mix’ due to her forced migration as a child from Uganda to Greenwood, Mississippi via England. Any attempt on Mina’s part to venture out of the ghetto formed by the ultra-conservative, business-minded racist Gujeratis in Greenwood is viewed as transgression of the socio-cultural codes of her community. Not even Mina’s father Jay, obsessed with the idea of returning home—to Uganda— can reconcile himself to the idea of his daughter’s relationship with Demetrius, an African-American carpet cleaner in Greenwood. Both Mina and Demetrius are ostracised for betraying their respective communities and they are forced to sever all ties and create a third space which remains liminal and makes it difficult for them to assert a state of belonging.

Seecharan Clem: India’s Awakening and the Imagining of the ‘East Indian Nation’ in British Guiana

22Notions of Mother India have been at the core of the shaping of Indo-Guyanese identity. From the 1890s, with the emergence of a small Indian middle class (several of whom were converts to Christianity), they sought to belong to their new homeland although they were not at ease with its creole sensibility. This tended to disparage them as ‘coolies’ (barbarians) whatever their social status. But an emergent India, retrieved from historical ignominy by European scholarship (Indology) that established her ancient achievements in diverse spheres, was the foundation of the ‘idea of India’ (Sunil Khilnani) and the dawn of a national awakening. This inspired pride in Indo-Guyanese that a resurgent motherland was capable of self-governance. The construction of an Indo-Guyanese identity, though defined by the creole milieu of the colony, would henceforth be refracted through an imagined India: part fact, part fantasy. It was a potent instrument for challenging the resilient ‘coolie’ stain.

23The article will explore ‘many Indias’ in the making of Indo-Guyanese identity, with emphasis on the role of amnesia, myth, history and more-or-less history in constructions of ‘Mother India’—the source of a sustaining vision. Special attention is given to the period between the 1890s and the 1930s.

Shands KerstinW.: Hyperfabula of Gains and Losses: Immanent-Transcendent Narrative Perspectives in KiranDesai’s The Inheritance of Loss

24Critics have pointed to the importance of ‘contemporary’ issues in Kiran Desai’s second novel, The Inheritance of Loss (2006). Commenting on the issues of ‘globalization, multiculturalism, economic inequality, fundamentalism and terrorist violence’, Pankaj Mishra, for example, has read The Inheritance of Loss as an ‘exploration of postcolonial chaos and despair’ that may ‘strike many readers as offering an unrelentingly bitter view’. While not refuting the validity of such views, this paper will offer a different perspective. Taking its cue from a line at the end of The Inheritance of Loss, where one of the main characters has gained the insight that she can no longer ‘think there was but one narrative and that this narrative belonged only to herself’, this paper will suggest that The Inheritance of Loss can be read as a hyperfabula that is local and universal as well as optimistic and pessimistic in equal measure. The worlds created by Desai are surveyed from an immanent-transcendent narrative position that embraces the smallest creature as lovingly as the widest landscapes while pointing to the possibility of serenity and survival in the midst of cruel and tragic events. Desai’s descriptions in their very profuseness could be seen as the main plot, in which an equalizing narrative movement balances gains and losses in animal and human worlds while placing the centripetal attractions of home and the centrifugal flights of diaspora in elaborate relief.

Steele Laurel: Writing Class with Mr. Khan: No Luncheon at Longchamps for the Jumbie Bird

25Almost forty years ago, Ismith Khan (1925-2002), taught a writing class at the University of California, Berkeley. The dynamics of that class raise larger issues about Khan’s work, and about Indian diasporic writings before the term existed. By the winter of 1971, when Khan faced the class, the writer had made a mark with two novels: The Jumbie Bird and The Obeah Man. But difficulties Khan encountered throughout his career were already apparent. Khan’s output would be slender and he would not attract a wide readership. Khan sensed a kind of marginalization. He was obsessed with The New Yorker’s refusal to publish his story, ‘Luncheon at Longchamps’. He critiqued one student’s work, set in Iran, as a ‘travelogue’. His struggles with a Vietnam veteran’s writings as well as with a student’s story about boar hunting in Yugoslavia betrayed other tensions. The class members spoke in a cacophony of cultures, all expressing themselves in traditionally-constructed short stories in English. And always in front of the class was Khan’s sad, intelligent face: Male, Black, Muslim, Indian, Trinidadian, Pathan. This paper explores Khan’s legacy by looking at issues that arose in the class and that we are only able to name and critically understand years later—issues of location, marginalization, time and identity.

Tadie Alexis: Is Cricket a Fictional Sport?

26This paper examines the fictional representations of cricket and argues that they contribute to a definition of the game. It examines the fictions of cricket, showing that they construct the game into a most distinct English fiction. Literary treatment of cricket must further be read in the context of the transformations of the game in the nineteenth century. The argument then concentrates on the decolonisation, and perhaps the ‘defictionalisation’, of cricket through the writings of C.L.R. James and Ashis Nandy. Finally, it turns to recent fictional perceptions of cricket, in particular to Romesh Gunesekera’s The Match as well as Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, and argues that they emphasise the diasporic nature of the game.

Zinck Pascal: The Return of the Natives: Infernal Paradise in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Romesh Gunesekera’s Heaven’s Edge

27This paper investigates the ideological tensions and ambiguities that are inherent in narratives of return. Unlike immigrants Kiran Desai’s Biju and Hamid Mohsin’s Changez who are beholden to myths of ‘Mother India’ / ‘Mother Pakistan’ as their dreams of El Dorado have drowned, Sri Lankan expatriates or refugees have a more ambivalent affiliation with their native country as they struggle with the scars of ethnic war between the Tamils and the Sinhalese.

28Both Michael Ondaatje and Romesh Gunesekera address the issues of identity, belonging and survival as their main protagonists return to their native land. In both novels, the narrators are marginalized as Westerners.

29Anil’s Ghost explores the tensions between Western human rights law or the duty to intervene and the Sri Lankan government’s efforts to derail all UN inquiries, which it regards as neo-colonial intrusions. In Heaven’s Edge, Marc’s (re) discovery of his roots is compromised by his touristic discourse.

30Both heterogeneous works resist pigeonholing along simplistic binaries that buttress communal violence. On their personal journeys the two narrators are changed as they relinquish their role as peripheral observers and engage with the victims. They encounter paradigms of regeneration through human agency and reconciliation with their environment and their past.