This edited volume looks 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. The volume presents with a dialogue between these representations and analyses how they are constructed, disseminated, appropriated and/or challenged in relation to recent political developments in South Asia and in the diaspora. Focusing on images and narratives about South Asia and its diaspora, the book aims to re-centre the political nature of representations, as it addresses the interplay between representation, imagination and identity, with a specific focus on the South Asian diasporic experience. This book will interest students and scholars of media, communication, popular culture, cultural studies, Asian studies, politics and sociology. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asian Diaspora.

Drawing from two political and several literary homelands, this collection presents a remarkable series of trenchant essays, demonstrating the full range and force of Salman Rushdie's remarkable imaginative and observational powers. With candour, eloquence and indignation he carefully examines an expanse of topics; including the politics of India and Pakistan, censorship, the Labour Party, Palestinian identity, contemporary film and late-twentieth century race, religion and politics. Elsewhere he trains his eye on literature and fellow writers, from Julian Barnes on love to the politics of George Orwell's 'Inside the Whale', providing fresh insight on Kipling, V.S. Naipaul, Graham Greene, John le Carré, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon among others. Profound, passionate and insightful, Imaginary Homelands is a masterful collection from one of the greatest writers working today.

This book is the first attempt to theorise South Asian Gothic production as a common cultural landscape, taking into account both the historical perspective and the variety of media texts. The volume consists of fifteen chapters by experts in film, literature and cultural studies of South Asia, representing the diversity of the region and a number of ways in which Gothic manifests in contemporary South Asian cultures. Gothic in South Asia can be read as a distinctive aesthetic, narrative practice, or a process of signification, where conventional Gothic tropes and imagery are assessed anew and global forms are consumed, appropriated, translated, transformed or resisted. The volume investigates South Asian Gothic as a local variety of international Gothic and part of the transnational category of globalgothic, contributing to the ongoing discussion on the need to de-westernise Gothic methodologies and ensure that Gothic scholarship remains relevant in the culturally-diverse modern world.

Tracing a literary lineage for works from different genres, it identifies key trends in recent South Asian American and British Asian literature by considering the favoured formal and aesthetic modes of major writers and by relating their work to differen

This volume addresses cultural and literary narratives of trauma in South Asian literature. Presenting a novel cross-cultural perspective on trauma theory, the essays within this volume study the divergent cultural responses to trauma and violence in various parts of South Asia, including Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Afghanistan, which have received little attention in literary writings on trauma in their specific circumstances. Through comprehensive sociocultural understanding of the region, this book creates an approachable space where trauma engages with themes like racial identity, ethnicity, nationality, religious dogma, and cultural environment. With case studies from Kashmir, the 1971 liberation war of Bangladesh, and armed conflict in Nepal and Afghanistan, the volume will be of interest to scholars, students and researchers of literature, history, politics, conflict studies, and South Asian studies.

The search for the location in which the self is ‘at home’ has been one of the primary projects of modern literature all over the world. Interpreting Homes: South Asian Literature attempts to map the narratives of the 'home' in South Asian literature from the advance of modernity on the subcontinent till the present day. It aims to read more than the domestic into representations of the home, to explore not only the geographical, but also the psychological and material connotations of 'home'. Its goal is to disassemble the concept of 'home' in all its incarnations as confinement, as stability, as security, as myth and as desire. The book problematises ‘home’ and its experience in different contexts. It investigates if and how home changes its significations when articulated from different locations, in different languages and by different subjects, paying particular attention to ideological determinants like gender and class. The editors of the anthology have encouraged contributors to also address diaspora writing and to achieve the widest possible comparative perspective. Though the focus has been kept on literature, some papers deal with cultural narratives of home in oral and folk mediums. The collection comprises of an Introduction and 18 original essays divided into six thematic sections.

In postcolonial theory we have now reached a new stage in the succession of key concepts. After the celebrations of hybridity in the work of Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak, it is now the concept of diaspora that has sparked animated debates among postcolonial critics. This collection intervenes in the current discussion about the 'new' diaspora by placing the rise of diaspora within the politics of multiculturalism and its supercession by a politics of difference and cultural-rights theory. The essays present recent developments in Jewish negotiations of diasporic tradition and experience, discussing the reinterpretation of concepts of the 'old' diaspora in late twentieth- century British and American Jewish literature. The second part of the volume comprises theoretical and critical essays on the South Asian diaspora and on multicultural settings between Australia, Africa, the Caribbean and North America. The South Asian and Caribbean diasporas are compared to the Jewish prototype and contrasted with the Turkish diaspora in Germany. All essays deal with literary reflections on, and thematizations of, the diasporic predicament.