Transnational lives, relational selves: South Asian diasporic memoirs

Abstract

Though the study of life writing within postcolonial contexts has witnessed a steady acceleration of critical interest in the last two decades, it has largely been focused on questions of either marginality and difference or hybridity and transnationalism. These are seen as exemplifying their exilic perspective which seems to evoke an aesthetic capable of transcending spatio-temporal constraints under conditions of globalisation As a consequence of this over-emphasis on the disruptive and the singular in diasporic aesthetics, other aspects of their life writing which signal towards specific historical continuities and shared legacies get undermined. This thesis responds to this critical omission by critically analysing examples of contemporary life writing by writers belonging to the South Asian diaspora whose histories have been shaped by both colonial and postcolonial migration. A context-sensitive reading of their memoirs reveals not only the interconnectedness between histories of colonialism and the global present but also the ethical charge that informs their self-referential aesthetic. The ethical commitment in their autobiographical aesthetic is manifested in the form of a grounding of their itinerant subjectivities in the granular histories of colonialism and a neo-colonial globalised present, as well as a commitment to an autobiographical ‘truth’ which is both experiential and epistemological. These postcolonial memoirs demonstrate that diasporic subjectivities can be experienced in ways that are both ethically ‘specific’ and aesthetically ‘singular’. While the specific mode is ‘relational’ in which identity is foregrounded in personal memory and collective history, the singular privileges an autobiographical ‘truth’ about these relational ties or an ‘event’ in both experiential and epistemological registers. I demonstrate that focusing our analysis on the ethical impulse that drives their diasporic subjectivity can illuminate how the genre of postcolonial life writing offers a productive site for mapping literary resistance to globalisation’s culture of ‘presentism’. To substantiate this interpretation of postcolonial life writing as a form of ethical mediation into the cultural effects of globalisation this research focuses on contemporary memoirs written by both descendants of the Indian diaspora of nineteenth century British colonialism and those who migrated to the west under late capitalism. While both demonstrate a commitment to an ethics of memory through which they resignify the importance of family ties, religious communities, and cultural histories in shaping their ‘specific’ diasporic identities, some also invest in a ‘singular’ aesthetic through which they unsettle conventional notions about autobiographical ‘truth’. The relational ethic is evident in the two memoirs by M G Vassanji, Rediscovering India: A Place Within (2008) as well as And Home Was Kariakoo: Memoir of an Indian African (2014), in which diasporic nostalgia for the author’s ancestral homeland and native birthplace is refracted through a critical lens. Similarly, in Brij V Lal’s ‘factional’ narrative On The Other Side of Midnight: A Fijian Journey (2005) the ethics of memory takes on the function of an ‘interventionist autobiography’ by a historian who shows how his life’s journey is mediated by the collective history of his Indo-Fijian community. By contrast, the relational imaginary of Satendra Nandan’s memoir Requiem for a Rainbow: A Fijian Indian Story (2001) takes the form of a melodramatic aesthetic. For Kirin Narayan’s ‘we-moir’ My family and Other Saints (2007), her anthropological interests converge with her autobiographical gesture as she contextualises her family’s spiritual quest within the specific cultural milieu of India of the late 1960s. And while Michael Ondaatje’s memoir Running in the Family (1982) is ostensibly a filiation narrative like Narayan’s, its aesthetic experimentation both reaffirms the relational ethic and calls into question the protocols of evidentiary knowledge by which autobiographical ‘truth’ is conventionally bound. Finally, as the case of Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton (2012) demonstrates a ‘singular’ aesthetic can also be used for autobiographical defence. By deploying the third person pronoun to chronicle his life after the fatwa, Rushdie foregrounds his subjective interpretation of the ‘event’ of the controversy generated by his novel The Satanic Verses (1989) over its more politically inflected readings. Notwithstanding the diversity of their transnational contexts and aesthetic concerns however, I argue that the relational ethic embedded in their life writing elucidates how contemporary diasporic subjects can be critically reflexive about their cultural history and religious identities, and can use the self-referential aesthetic of autobiography to problematize the notion of truth itself. In this sense South Asian diasporic life writing provides a significant archive for investigating how postcolonial literature intervenes in some of the disruptive cultural effects produced by globalisation.