R.K. Narayan: Straddling Metropole and Malgudi

“In her essay ‘Resistance through Sub/Mission in the Novels of R. K. Narayan,’ Hyacinth Cynthia Wyatt argues that ‘among Indian authors writing in English, R. K. Narayan was among the first to resist Western cultural dominance’…

(Not) being at home: Hsu Ming Teo's Behind the Moon (2005) and Michelle de Kretser's Questions of Travel (2012)

This article examines some interventions of Asian Australian writing into the debate over multiculturalism, and the shift from negative stereotyping of Asian migrants, to reification of racial divisions and propagation of a masked racism, to the creation of new alignments and the revival of pre-existing affiliations by migrant and second generation subjects. It compares the practices of not-at-homeness by Asian migrants and their descendants and white Australians in Hsu Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon with those of a Sri Lankan refugee and a white Australian traveller in Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel. The changing concepts of belonging in the novels show a realignment of core and periphery relations within the nation state under the pressures of multiculturalism and globalization: where home is and how it is configured are questions as important for white Australians whose sense of territory is challenged as they are for Asian migrants who seek to establish a new belonging

Nostalgia for the past as guide to the future: Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People

Rooted in the movement of disparate peoples and cultures around the globe, both European colonization and the transatlantic slave trade it engendered were infused from the outset by a complex web of competing nostalgias. Colonizers and colonized alike held idealized conceptions of home, which were employed to varying effect in the new lands, shifting and revising as time went by. This variety of nostalgic affiliations led to scenarios where those we might least expect grew to use the nostalgic terminologies of other, seemingly opposing groups. The Caribbean author Paule Marshall makes this proliferation of nostalgic modes clear. The subversive, reflective nostalgia she ultimately champions in her novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969) exposes the political resonances of the seemingly personal desire for home, connecting with wider debates about the utility of nostalgia within postcolonial studies

Diasporic romances gone bad: Impossible returns to Africa in Myriam Warner-Vieyra’s Juletane

peer reviewe

Kipling's famine-romance: masculinity, gender and colonial biopolitics in “William the Conqueror”

This essay concentrates on one of Kipling’s short-stories, ‘William the Conqueror’, first published in an American women’s magazine, and speculates on how a female audience might have caused Kipling to modify his (conventional) depiction of Anglo-Indian gender-relations. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s work and reviewing the history of colonial famine-relief, I suggest that the formal conjunction of the romance genre with the unusual setting of a famine-relief camp is the key to Kipling’s ‘gender-transactions’ in this story, and can be read as an indicator of the ‘biopolitical’ logic of the camp as a space of sovereign exception