Diaspora-Homeland Connection in Bharati Gautam’s Vigata ra Baduli [Past and Hiccups]

This article aims to explore the way Bharati Gautam’s memoir Vigata ra Baduli [Past and Hiccups] (2020) connects the writer with her homeland. Home and homeland are out of some major loci of diasporic life and the discourse. Diasporic writings deal with homeland both as a real place to return and an imaginary reality for those transnational migrants who have no chance of physical return to the place left back. To study the writer’s homeland connection as expressed in the book, this study uses qualitative methodology with its interpretative approach for analysis. The theoretical input is the diasporic discourse related to home and homeland. For the diasporans, homeland is the root of their life, culture, language and in total the life they live in the hostland. The time a diaspora loses its physical, imaginary or emotional connection with the homeland, it stops being a diaspora. Thus, every diasporic writing has some kind of homeland connection. The study finds that Gautam’s memoirs deal with her love and respect for the root. These feelings are expressed through her nostalgia, symbols and culture she follows in the USA. Similarly, her own and her children’s critical thoughts on Nepal and Nepali socio-cultural praxis also highlight their connection with the homeland. It is hoped that this study is useful to find how Nepali Diaspora connects itself with Nepal. It may encourage the researchers to work in this field.

Formation and Fulfillment of 'Homing Desire' in Ghimire's "Diaspora"

Where is the home of Nepali diasporans? Is Nepal still their home? The recent theory of diaspora questions the traditional notions of home and homeland. Their place has been taken by the discourse of ‘homing desire’ that is the desire to make a home in the host land. Such a home has the quality of both of the homes that is the home they have left behind and the standard home they see in the host land. In Nepali Diaspora, too, such a theme has crept into literary creations. In this article Hari Ghimire’s poem “Diaspora” has been analysed so as to see how it depicts the development of ‘homing desire’ and its fulfilment. The speaker of the poem, in the beginning, expresses his desire to home, i.e. feel comfortable, himself in the diaspora. Later he is happy because of the fulfilment of the desire. This analysis is primarily based on Avtar Brah’s theory of ‘homing desire’. The insights of Salman Rushdie’s idea of ‘imaginary homeland’ and Sara Ahmed’s concept of home in the globalized time have been used to support and extend Brah’s theoretical stand. It is hoped that this article will encourage further discourse on ‘homing desire’ in the study of Nepali Diaspora and its literature.

“Why do you want to go to Hawai‘i?”

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book follows the struggles of contemporary Filipino immigrants to physically and figuratively build community, where they enact a politics of incorporation built on race, ethnicity, class, culture, and language. It focuses on two sites of building and representation, the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the Filipino Community Center in Waipahu. At these two sites, the book focuses on the narratives and discourses about “home” and “homeland.” In particular, it asks how immigrants talk about their relationships to the place(s) they left and the place(s) to which they have settled and, consequently, how these discourses shape their identities and politics.

Chasing some bodies: Tracing the embodiment of female refugees in transnational settings and reading tales of their bodies

The way individuals embody their homeland has been addressed by several scholars. However, this article questions how female refugees embody transnational settings while seeking a new home and homeland. The tales of bodies are traced through the writings of three Iranian female refugees living in Europe. The article analyses their autobiographies through a critical reading of Thomas Csordas’s phenomenology of body–world relations and then diverges from him to draw inspiration from Deleuzian becoming. The study attempts to offer an anthropology of becoming to highlight how corporeality is the realm of bodies becoming.