scholarly journals Re-orientalism in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s The Selector of Souls

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Urvashi Kaushal ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
South Asian ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Edward Said ◽  
South Asian Diaspora ◽  
Indian Culture ◽  
The West ◽  
Seminal Work ◽  
Asian Diaspora ◽  
Stereotypical Image

In his seminal work Orientalism Edward Said destabilized the Euro-American practice of constructing, approving and disseminating a stereotypical image of Asia as exotic backward called the ‘Orient’. This paper takes Said’s concept of Orientalism as a premise to highlight ‘self–orientalism’ or ‘re-Orientalism’ as a growing trend in South Asian diaspora writers, especially since the turn of the 21st century. It utilizes the idea of orientalism and reads Shauna Singh Baldwin’s The Selector of Souls against the grain to accentuate the reification of Indian culture into a commodity and homogenisation of complex cultural differences in multicultural India for the consumption of the West. In its effort to find answers for this growing trend, it analyses the nexus between location and commodification of literature produced by diaspora writers.

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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