Examining a range of South Asian Anglophone diasporic fiction and poetry, this monograph opens a new dialogue between diaspora studies and gender studies. It shows how discourses of diaspora benefit from re-examining their own critical relation to concepts of the maternal and the motherland. Rather than considering maternity as a fixed or naturally given category, it challenges essentialist conceptions and explores mothering as a performative practice which actively produces discursive meaning. This innovative approach also involves an investigation of central metaphors in nationalist and diasporic rhetorics, bringing critical attention to the strategies they employ and the unique aesthetic forms they produce.
Author(s): Sarah Knor
Series: Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 230
City: New York
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
1 Introduction: More than one mother
1.1 Gender and nation
1.2 Theories of the maternal
1.3 Theories of diaspora
1.4 Outline of chapters
2 Historical performances: Reading Mother India in nationalist discourse and Kipling
2.1 Bharat Mata
2.2 Kipling's imperial Mother India
3 Citational performances: "Talking major mother country" in Rushdie's Midnight's Children
3.1 Diasporic maternal practices
3.2 Victorian Mothers
3.3 The performance of mothering
3.4 "De-condensing" Mother India
3.5 Diasporic bastards
4 Exile performances: Pakistani mother–daughter relationships in Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India and Sara Suleri's Meatless Days
4.1 Sidhwa's matricide
4.2 Suleri's mother elegy
5 Maternal performances: Mother tongues in Ravinder Randhawa's A Wicked Old Woman and Monica Ali's Brick Lane
5.1 Performing the mother tongue
5.2 A wicked old mother
5.3 Herethics and diasporic mothering
5.4 Diasporic seas
5.5 Ali's coming-of-agency
6 Outlook and conclusion: Diasporic maternal aesthetics
6.1 Indo-Caribbean labours
6.2 Retrospects and prospects
Works cited
Index
