Gendered Migrations and Literary Narratives: Writing Communities in South Asian Diaspora

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suman
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
South Asian Diaspora ◽  
Asian Origin ◽  
Asian Diaspora ◽  
Job Opportunities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Publishing Houses ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Writing Communities

Migrations are gendered journeys. During contemporary times when migrations happen due to personal reasons like pursuit of better job opportunities, the spouses, mostly women, face several challenges in finding jobs and sustaining a career. Many of these qualified women often turn to alternate means of finding identity and fulfilment. Writing is one activity that provides them with this sense of purpose and achievement. The personal act of writing a literary text becomes as much a social activity when few of them form writing communities. This socio-literary study begins with an analysis of the social and material conditions that foster gendered migrations, and goes on to analyse writing as an alternate career, the role these gendered writing communities play in the process of writing, publishing and marketing as well as the choice of certain topics, like romance, thus functioning as mini-publishing houses. Through detailed interviews of five women writers of South Asian origin, this paper posits that these popular narratives, the products of these writing communities, are very temporal in nature and a product of interesting intersections between migrations as a condition and the gendered communities.

Sikhs and the City: Sikh history and diasporic practice in Singapore

2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 1465-1498 ◽  
Author(s):  
GERARD McCANN
Keyword(s):  
South Asian ◽  
Model Minority ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Minority Status ◽  
South Asian Diaspora ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Asian Diaspora ◽  
South Indian ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

AbstractThe historiography of South Asian diaspora in colonial Southeast Asia has overwhelmingly focused on numerically dominant South Indian labourers at the expense of the small, but important, North Indian communities, of which the Sikhs were the most visually conspicuous and politically important. This paper will analyse the creation of various Sikh communities in one critical territory in British Asia—Singapore, and chart the development of the island's increasingly unified Sikh community into the post-colonial period. The paper will scrutinize colonial economic roles and socio-cultural formation, whilst links of Singaporean Sikhs to Punjab and their place within the post-colonial Singaporean state will preoccupy the latter portion of the paper. It will argue that more complicated notions of division relative to the social norms of Punjab must be acknowledged in this region of Sikh diaspora and indeed others. The final sections will assess the remarkable success of local Sikhs in utilizing statist policies of ‘domesticating difference’ towards altered ‘community’ ends. Such attachment to the state and the discursive parity of Singapore's Sikhs with official values, moreover, stymied the appeal of transnational Sikh militant movements that gained momentum in the West in the 1980s. The result has been the assertion of ‘model minority’ status for Singapore's Sikhs and notably successful socialization into Singaporean society.

Australianama

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samia Khatun
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
South Asian ◽  
South Asian Diaspora ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Asian Diaspora ◽  
Broken Hill ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Anglophone World ◽  
Indian Ocean World

Australian deserts remain dotted with the ruins of old mosques. Beginning with a Bengali poetry collection discovered in a nineteenth-century mosque in the town of Broken Hill, Samia Khatun weaves together the stories of various peoples colonized by the British Empire to chart a history of South Asian diaspora. Australia has long been an outpost of Anglo empires in the Indian Ocean world, today the site of military infrastructure central to the surveillance of 'Muslim-majority' countries across the region. Imperial knowledges from Australian territories contribute significantly to the Islamic-Western binary of the post- Cold War era. In narrating a history of Indian Ocean connections from the perspectives of those colonized by the British, Khatun highlights alternative contexts against which to consider accounts of non-white people. Australianama challenges a central idea that powerfully shapes history books across the Anglophone world: the colonial myth that European knowledge traditions are superior to the epistemologies of the colonized. Arguing that Aboriginal and South Asian language sources are keys to the vast, complex libraries that belie colonized geographies, Khatun shows that stories in colonized tongues can transform the very ground from which we view past, present and future.

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