‘Transnational Identities of the Global South Asian Diaspora in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Africa, 1900s-1940s’

This article addresses two key research questions: 1. Was the rhetoric about the equality of all British subjects adopted by South Asian migrants in the British Empire’s self-governing Dominions in the first half of the twentieth century? and 2. Did the experience of living in predominantly white countries encourage migrants from the Punjab and other regions in South Asia to adopt a common pan-South Asian identity? It explores these two research questions with each of the four countries of the focus of this article in turn, before making some comparisons.

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

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.