Introduction to Mapping Diasporic Subjectivities

The last two decades have witnessed a growing interest in theorizing literary narratives that address the South Asian diasporic experience. By and large, however, what has emerged is an academic consensus which accords an ever-greater visibility to mainstream diasporic voices from North America, U.K., some parts of Africa and of the Caribbean, at the expense of narratives dealing with South Asian diasporic communities that are based in other locations. Also, such critical consensus valorizes certain class-streamed patterns of migration over others, with the result of homogenizing the diversity of today’s South Asian diaspora. This special issue explores literary representations of the migrant experiences of those underrepresented South Asian communities based in locations such as South America, East Europe, the Gulf, West Africa and East Asia

Introduction: race relations and the South Asian diasporic imaginary

In today's western multicultural societies, Eurocentric notions of 'black' and 'white' have polarised the debate about racial relations and effaced the complexities of interaction between South Asian migrant communities and people of other ethnic and racial backgrounds. This special issue is geared toward exploring how the complexity of contemporary race relations between the South Asian and the African communities, as well as its legacy in Africa, the Caribbean, and the India Ocean, find expression through literary and cultural narratives. Engaging with a variety of colonial and postcolonial contexts - namely Mauritius, South Africa, Bengal, Barbados, Kenya, and Trinidad - our contributors attempt to address gaps in the exploration of race relations from within the South Asian diasporic imaginary and to understand race relations in the context of British colonial-capitalist expansion and of its postcolonial and global inflections