To see the other types of publications on this topic, follow the link: South Asian diaspora in literature.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'South Asian diaspora in literature'
Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles
Consult the top 50 dissertations / theses for your research on the topic 'South Asian diaspora in literature.'
Next to every source in the list of references, there is an 'Add to bibliography' button. Press on it, and we will generate automatically the bibliographic reference to the chosen work in the citation style you need: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, Vancouver, etc.
You can also download the full text of the academic publication as pdf and read online its abstract whenever available in the metadata.
Browse dissertations / theses on a wide variety of disciplines and organise your bibliography correctly.
1
Kaushik, Ratika. "Homing diaspora/diasporizing home : locating South Asian diasporic literature and film." Thesis, University of Sussex, 2018. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/73136/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis contains a detailed study of contemporary South Asian diasporic literary and cinematic works in English. The majority of the works analyzed and discussed are those produced from the 1980s onwards. My research investigates how selected diasporic texts and films from South Asia problematize representations of homeland and host spaces. I reveal in the course of this study, how these works, actively negotiate alternative modalities of belonging that celebrate the plurality of cultural identities within and outside the homeland. This exploration of diasporic narratives of homeland and host land is explored by examining these narratives across two mediums: the cinematic and the literary. In so doing, the thesis initiates a dialogue between the two mediums and locates these selected diasporic works within a larger tapestry of contemporary cultural, literary and global contexts. The thesis shows that these literary and filmic representations celebrate as well as present an incisive critique of the different cultural spaces they inhabit. The thesis also reveals how, in representing the experiences of multiple-linguistic, geographical, historical dislocations, these texts invite readers to see the changing faces of diasporic cultures and identities. My thesis complements this analysis of representation with a broader analysis of the reception of these diasporic works. My analysis sets out to move away from the critical tendency to scrutinize texts in relation to a politicized rhetoric of reception which privileges a reading of texts through insider/outsider binarism, by drawing together and contrasting academic and popular responses in the reception of diasporic texts. In so doing, my thesis reads these texts as agents of cultural production, focusing on interpretative possibilities of the literary critical mode of reading and enabling nuanced modes of analysis attentive to issues of diasporic identity, the identity of nation-states and the emergent global dynamics of migrant narratives. The texts I analyze are Salman Rushdie‘s Midnight's Children (1981) and The Satanic Verses (1988), Micheal Ondaatje‘s Running in the Family (1982) and Anil's Ghost (2000), Rohinton Mistry‘s A Fine Balance (1995), Mohsin Hamid‘s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), and Hanif Kureishi‘s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and as well as two filmic texts, Mira Nair‘s The Namesake (2007) and Gurinder Chadha‘s Bend It Like Beckham (2001).
2
Girishkumar, Divya. "Diaspora and multiculturalism : British South Asian women's writing." Thesis, Cardiff University, 2014. http://orca.cf.ac.uk/73381/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis analyses how the British South Asian diaspora is conceptualized, understood and reflected in a selection of female-authored literary texts which engage with the multicultural policies of the British state from the 1950s to the present. The primary sources include Attia Hosain’s Phoenix Fled (1953) and Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961), Kamala Markandaya’s Possession (1963) and The Nowhere Man (1972), Ravinder Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman (1987), Meera Syal’s Anita and Me (1996), Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Shelina Zahra Janmohamed’s Love in a Headscarf: Muslim Woman seeks the One (2009) and Rosie Dastgir’s A Small Fortune (2012). I conceive of British multicultural state policies as unfolding in three major phases: Assimilation (1950- 1979), Integration (1980-2001), Social Cohesion/Interculturalism (2001- present). The thesis examines these policy changes and illustrates how these shifts are mirrored in and shape the character of British South Asian women’s writings. In the light of this I argue that British South Asian women writers’ engagement with a sense of exile, dislocation or a ‘teleology of return’ along with a symbolic longing to create imaginary homelands has produced new alliances which exist outside what has been called the national time/space in order ‘to live inside, with a difference’. Through the selected writers’ individual attempts to configure new fictional home spaces, a new architecture for the diasporic imagination is constructed around the poetics of home and the multicultural politics of identity. Such cross-cultural literary interventions exist both within and outside colonial and postcolonial genealogies, reconfiguring the critical geographies by which they have been mostly defined. The first two chapters of the thesis attempt to define the complex configurations of the concept of multiculturalism and its interconnections with the terminology of diaspora. I have adopted a reading strategy tracing the South Asian migration history to Britain and the early literary representations which powerfully illuminate the fragmented imagination of the South Asian diaspora in terms of contemporary theoretical paradigms. The next three chapters analyse literary representations by Attia Hosain, Kamala Markandaya, Ravinder Randhawa, Meera Syal, Monica Ali, Shelina Zahra Janmohamed and Rosie Dastgir, who highlight and complicate the issues of race, ethnicity and gender in relation to the rhetoric of multiculturalism and multicultural policies. The writers use various strategies that testify to the innate relation between the political ‘real’ and the literary ‘imaginary’ and explain how real life experiences provide fuel to the ‘diasporic imaginary’ and affirm the transnational potency of literature.
3
Hoene, Christin. "Sing who you are : music and identity in postcolonial British-South Asian literature." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/7794.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis examines the role of music in British-South Asian postcolonial literature, asking how music relates to the possibility of constructing postcolonial identity. The focus is on novels that explore the postcolonial condition in India and the United Kingdom, as well as Pakistan and the United States: Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy (1993), Amit Chaudhuri's Afternoon Raag (1993), Suhayl Saadi's Psychoraag (2004), Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia (1990) and The Black Album (1995), and Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999). The analysed novels feature different kinds of music, from Indian classical to non-classical traditions, and from Western classical music to pop music and rock 'n' roll. Music is depicted as a cultural artefact and as a purely aestheticised art form at the same time. As a cultural artefact, music derives meaning from its socio-cultural context of production and serves as a frame of reference to explore postcolonial identities on their own terms. As purely aesthetic art, music escapes its contextual meaning. The transcendental qualities of music render music a space where identities can be expressed irrespective of origin and politics of location. Thereby, music in the novels marks a very productive space to imagine the postcolonial nation and to rewrite imperial history, to express the cultural hybridity of characters in-between nations, to analyse the state of the nation and life in the multicultural diaspora of contemporary Great Britain, and to explore the ramifications of cultural globalisation versus cultural imperialism. Analysing music's cultural meaning and aesthetic value in relation to postcolonial identity, this thesis opens up new frames of textual and cultural analysis that help understand the postcolonial condition from the interdisciplinary perspective of word and music studies.
4
Naidu, Sam. "Towards a transnational feminist aesthetic: an analysis of selected prose writing by women of the South Asian diaspora." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1012941.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis argues that women writers of the South Asian diaspora are inscribing a literary aesthetic which is recognisably feminist. In recent decades women of the South Asian diaspora have risen to the forefront of the global literary and publishing arena, winning acclaim for their endeavours. The scope of this literature is wide, in terms of themes, styles, genres, and geographic location. Prose works range from grave novelistic explorations of female subjectivity to short story collections intent on capturing historical injustices and the experiences of migration. The thesis demonstrates, through close readings and comparative frameworks, that an overarching pattern of common aesthetic elements is deployed in this literature. This deployment is regarded as a transnational feminist practice.
5
Aujla, Angela. "Contesting identities in diasporic spaces, multigenerational South Asian Canadian women's literature." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp03/MQ51290.pdf.
Full text
6
Emmambokus, Shehrazade. "Contemporary adolescent fiction from the South Asian diaspora : multicultural children's literature of the millennium and the potential for bibliotherapy." Thesis, Kingston University, 2011. http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/20273/.
Full textAbstract:
The study of children's literature from the South Asian diaspora has been mostly overlooked by postcolonial studies, cultural studies and children's literature studies alike. This thesis responds to this academic oversight and it is not only the first study to solely explore the diasporic experience presented in these novels, but also opens up an area of research which has great cross-disciplinary potential. At the centre of this thesis is the argument that existing theories of identity negotiation offer only partial explanations of how young, second generation individuals negotiate their cultural identities, and that children's literature, by contrast, illuminates an alternative means of identity formation. There is no definitive cultural identity model which focuses solely on how post-migrant generations, including foreign-born migrant children, negotiate their cultural identities. Yet the fiction this thesis examines demands the need for precisely such a model. Drawing on the works of Homi Bhabha, A vtar Brah and Stuart Hall, the model that emerges from the fiction is best identified as what I have termed: Overlapping Space. Engaging with a wide range of postcolonial, cultural and sociological theorists, the study focuses on novels published since 2000 and identifies how they offer a model of Overlapping Space identity formation. Engaging with Bali Rai's What's Your Problem? and Kavita Daswani's Indie Girl the thesis begins by identifying how issues of race and racism are still prevalent to contemporary concerns. Developing these concerns, the study draws on Marina Budhos's Ask Me No Questions and Mitali Perkins's First Daughter: Extreme American Makeover to investigate how media influences post-9/l1 have affected young peoples' cultural self-identities. Shifting the focus from imposed 'home'land cultural alienation to self-imposed 'homeland' cultural estrangement through abjection, the study identifies the psychological effects of visiting ancestral homelands as depicted in Vineeta Vijayaraghavan's Motherland and Mitali Perkins' Monsoon Summer in order to demonstrate the experience of emotional situational ethnicity through unexpected enculturations. Continuing with the discussion of emotional situational ethnicity, using Narinder Dhami's novelization Bend it Like Beckham and Baljinder K. Mahal's The Pocket Guide to Being an Indian Girl, this thesis explores how young second generation members of the South Asian diaspora navigate between 'peer' and 'parent' zones and analyses the significant role that subcultures can play in the approval of 'transgression'. Lastly, by focussing on Tanuja Desai Hidier's Born Confused and Bali Rai's The Last Taboo, this thesis continues its exploration in 'transgressive' behaviours and analyses the dating and interracial relationship cultural concerns presented in these two novels. By exploring these themes, issues and concerns, this study ultimately foregrounds each text's potential for bibliotherapy and demonstrates that, as well as making significant contributions to literature and cultural studies, these novels serve an important social function as well. Consequently, via the universalising bibliotherapeutic function of these novels, this thesis ultimately argues that these novels not only foreground and legitimise Overlapping Space identities but actively help build these identities as well.
7
Edirisinghe, Ruwanthi. "Violence as a Point of Orientation in the Formation of Sri Lankan Diasporic Subjectivities." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1626142806903796.
Full text
8
Gohain, Atreyee. "Where the Global Meets the Local: Female Mobility in South Asian Women's Fiction in India and the U.S." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2015. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1428022854.
Full text
9
Yousofi, Zehra Ahmed. "No Country for Diasporic Men: The Psychological Development of South Asian Masculinities in The Buddha of Suburbia and The Mimic Man." TopSCHOLAR®, 2016. http://digitalcommons.wku.edu/theses/1612.
Full textAbstract:
The purpose of this thesis is to examine the psychological development of South Asian masculinity in a diaspora that is depicted in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia and V.S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men. Together, Kureishi and Naipaul construct a complete understanding of masculinity through childhood, adolescent, young adult, and adulthood. Chapter 1 explores the need to displace their father’s masculinity and seek better masculine models that align with the social norms of the diaspora. Chapter 2 establishes the motivation behind seeking peers to define the meaning of masculinity in a diaspora and the disadvantage of this pathway. Chapter 3 demonstrates two possible outcomes for South Asian men attempting to construct a secure masculinity. The difficulties these characters encounter when developing their identity is both a product of their diasporic environment and the lingering effect of colonization through the presence of hegemonic masculinity. They attempt to rectify the inadequacies in their masculinity by refuting a portion of their identity tied to being South Asian in order to better assimilate to the ideals of their diaspora. Ultimately, there are two possible consequences for South Asian men in a diaspora: one is to attempt to negotiate their position as a mixture of both the ideals of the diaspora and South Asian culture and the second is to continue to live a fragmented life of denying aspects of their identity tied to either the diaspora or South Asian culture.
10
Shabangu, Mohammad. "In search of the comprador: self-exoticisation in selected texts from the South Asian and Middle Eastern diasporas." Thesis, Rhodes University, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1017770.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis is concerned with transnational literature and writers of the Middle Eastern and South Asian diasporas. It argues that the diasporic position of the authors enables their roles as comprador subjects. The thesis maintains that the figure of the comprador is always acted upon by its ontological predisposition, so that diasporic positionality often involves a single subject which straddles and speaks from two or more different subject positions. Comprador authors can be said to be co-opted by Western metropolitan publishing companies who stand to benefit by marketing the apparent marginality of the homelands about which these authors write. The thesis therefore proceeds from the notion that such a diasporic position is the paradoxical condition of the transnational subject or writer. I submit that there is, to some degree, a questionable element in the common political and cultural suggestions that emerge upon closer evaluation of diasporic literature. Indeed, a charge of complicity has been levelled against authors who write, apparently, to service two distinct entities – the wish to speak on behalf of a minority collective, as well as the imperial ‘centre’ which is the intended interlocutor of the comprador author. However, it is this difference, the implied otherness or marginality of the outsider within, which I argue is sometimes used by diasporic writers as a way of articulating with ‘authenticity’ the cultures and politics of their erstwhile localities. This thesis is concerned, therefore, with the representation of ‘the East’ in four novels by diasporic, specifically comprador writers, namely Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns. I suggest that the ‘third-world’ and transnational literature can also be a selling point for the transnational subject, whose representations may at times pander to preconceived ideas about ‘the Orient’ and its people. As an illustration of this double-bind, I offer a close reading of all the novels to suggest that on the one hand, the comprador author writes within the paradigm of the ‘writing back’ movement, as a counter-discourse to the Orientalist representations of the homeland. However, the corollary is that such an attempt to ‘write back’, in a sense, re-inscribes the very discourse it wishes to subvert, especially because the literature is aimed at a ‘Western’ audience. Moreover, the template of the comprador could be used to explain how a transnational post-9/11 text from an Afghan-American, for instance, may be put to the service of the imperial machine, and read, therefore, as a supporting document to the U.S. policy on Afghanistan.
11
Srinivasan, Ragini Tharoor. "Thinking “What We Are Doing”: V. S. Naipaul and Amitav Ghosh on Being in Diaspora, History, and World." South Asian Literary Association, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/626247.
Full text
12
Chetty, Raj G. "Versions of America : reading American literature for identity and difference /." Diss., CLICK HERE for online access, 2006. http://contentdm.lib.byu.edu/ETD/image/etd1528.pdf.
Full text
13
Jones, Stephanie Jillian. "Novels of the South Asian diaspora in East Africa." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2003. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/251877.
Full text
14
Sharma, Ashma. "Transnational lives, relational selves: South Asian diasporic memoirs." Phd thesis, Canberra, ACT : The Australian National University, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/154324.
Full textAbstract:
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.
15
Turner-Rahman, Israt. "Consciousness blossoming Islamic feminism and Qur'anic exegesis in South Asian muslim diaspora communities /." Pullman, Wash. : Washington State University, 2009. http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Dissertations/Spring2009/I_Turner-Rahman_050109.pdf.
Full text
16
Kalayil, Sheena. "Tales from the diaspora : a narrative enquiry into second-generation South Asian Britons." Thesis, Lancaster University, 2017. http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/86911/.
Full textAbstract:
I present a qualitative study using the narratives, elicited through interviews, of seven second-generation South Asian Britons; five men and two women, aged at the time of the interviews between 35 to 50 years. My participants are higher professionals who have married out of their ethnic and linguistic communities, and who are parents of dual-heritage children ̶ a target group that is under-represented in linguistics research. I investigate the participants’ relationship with their South Asian Heritage Language ̶ the languages being Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil and Konkani ̶ and the dynamics of languages in their families (their birth families and their own families), showing that the factors which influence language maintenance and transmission are varied and unpredictable, and not always related to proficiency in or affinity to the Heritage Language and culture. I also investigate how the participants exploit the interview platform I give them, arguing that the participants perform the habitus (Bourdieu, 1991) of a member of the South Asian diaspora, with acute awareness of how their lives share similarities with and differ from the Discourses (Gee, 1999) surrounding South Asians in Britain. I analyse the narratives using an emic perspective of the functional use of discourse, using aspects of conversation analysis and using a Bakhtinian perspective of language. I show how the participants use the discourse to point to Discourses as well as different linguistic and cultural capitals (Bourdieu, 1990) available to them. My thesis regards the narratives firstly as a body of text for discourse analysis, offering three themes: how the participants use temporal and spatial references, how they use ‘voices’, and how they ‘recreate’ their pasts using chronotopes (Bakhtin, 1981). Secondly, by regarding the narratives individually, I show that within the interview-time the participants present a macro-narrative of themselves, explaining and/or justifying how they have become the person they are now. By treating the narratives in these two ways I contribute to the exploration of methodologies that can be used in narrative enquiry while providing new insights into practices surrounding language maintenance and loss in dual-heritage families.
17
Ramnath, Maia. "'The haj to utopia' : anti-colonial radicalism in the South Asian diaspora, 1905-1930 /." Diss., Digital Dissertations Database. Restricted to UC campuses, 2008. http://uclibs.org/PID/11984.
Full text
18
Pirbhai, Mariam. "The multiple voices of indenture history : the South Asian diasporic novel in English." Thèse, [Montréal] : Université de Montréal, 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/umontreal/fullcit?pNQ92768.
Full textAbstract:
Thèse (Ph.D.) -- Université de Montréal, 2004."Thèse présentée à la Faculté des études supérieures en vue de l'obtention du grade de Philosophiae Doctor (Ph.D.) en études anglaises" Version électronique également disponible sur Internet.
19
Chandra, Shiva. "Friends are important but ‘blood’s blood’: Gay Men’s Personal Communities within the South Asian Diaspora." Thesis, University of Sydney, 2020. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/22876.
Full textAbstract:
This study explores the relationships and identities of gay men of South Asian descent in Australia. In doing so, it moves beyond the emphasis traditionally placed on sexuality for understanding gay men’s biographies. The emphasis on ‘gay community’ and ‘families of choice’ perpetuates the idea that sexuality is the primary factor in shaping gay men’s existence. Yet this limits an understanding of the scope of the relationships and identities within these men’s lives. In contrast, this study utilises the concept of ‘personal community’ to deal with such limitations and expand our knowledge of these men’s important personal ties. Personal communities provides an open-ended theoretical framework and methodological tool, which affords a variegated and comprehensive understanding of gay men’s relationships and identities. A total of 15 respondents placed their relationships on personal community maps, which were then explored through semi-structured interviews. Findings reveal that gay men’s personal communities are made up of: families of origin, friends and romantic partners. Factors that influence how gay men think and feel about these relationships include: blood ties, shared history, emotional attachments, obligations, intimacy and friendship. Overall, findings reveal that gay men have many different connections which are important to them, and that these play a significant role in shaping their multi-faceted identities. However, of special significance are findings suggesting that gay men are committed to their families of origin. Until now, there has been surprisingly little investigation of how families fit into the lives of gay men. In contrast, this study demonstrates that this group of gay men maintain strong commitments to family members. This is the case irrespective of whether relatives accept gay men’s sexual orientation, disapprove of it, or remain uninformed about it, suggesting that blood ties are particularly significant attachments.
20
Tolia-Kelly, Divya Praful. "Iconographies of diaspora : refracted landscapes and textures of memory of South Asian women in London." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2002. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1383055/.
Full textAbstract:
Diasporic journeys of South Asian women are examined in this thesis as a record of British Asian oral history and migration. Biographical mapping is used as a means to interrogate the complex diasporic relationship between national identity and race. The thesis seeks to investigate the relationships between the racialised body and the experience of dislocation lived through by South Asian women in London. Identity, memory and landscape are core themes that run through the thesis. Remembered landscapes and environmental memories are points of identification. These environments and textures of memory have a multisensory nature. These in turn are refracted as icons in the visual and material cultures of the home. Home as a site of belonging becomes a space through which these women express their relationship with citizenship in Britain, their experience of life in the colony, and their experience of rupture with their birthplace. Relationships between various lands, landscapes, social and cultural iconographies are revealed through a study of cultures in the home. Iconographies of "home" are further investigated in the thesis through a visual project conducted with landscape artist Melanie Carvalho, and the study group. A set of 17 canvases have been painted from the women's descriptions of "home". These are, in turn, analysed as visual representations of remembered, idealised icons of intimate landscapes. This results in an examination of the multiple axes within which the diasporic group practises identification, and through which they are themselves configured. The research study uses a process of grounded theorising by examining biographies, oral histories, and investigating visual and material cultures in the home. These are treated as triggers of identification which operate as metonymical devices of negotiation, resistance and placing.
21
Assella, Shashikala Muthumal. "Contemporary South Asian American women's fiction : the "difference"." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2015. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/29786/.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis critically explores the “difference” of contemporary South Asian American women’s fiction and their fictional narratives of women’s lives, away from the ethnic postcolonial depictions of diasporic women. The selected novels of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Amulya Malladi, Bharti Kirchner, V.V. Ganeshananthan, Nayomi Munaweera, Nausheen Pasha-Zaidi and Shaila Abdullah studied here interrogate the depiction of South Asian women characters both within diasporic American locations and in South Asian settings. These writers establish individual identities that defy homogeneity assigned to regional identities and establish heterogeneous characters that are influenced through transnational travel. This dissertation’s engagement with exotic identities, foodways, ethno-social identities and diasporic and native socio-cultural pressures for women, offers a “different” reading of contemporary South Asian women’s fiction. The identities that are being reinvented by the selected Indian, Sri Lankan and Pakistani American women writers destabilise established boundaries for women’s identity in South Asian American women’s fiction by using old and new tropes such as folkloric myths, nostalgia, food and ethnic relationships. The transnational cosmopolitan locations that enable the re-negotiation of identities enable the women characters to fashion their own uniqueness. I argue that a “difference” in South Asian American women’s contemporary writing has emerged in recent times, that looks beyond ethno-social diasporic identities. These changes not only advance the already established tropes in women’s literature, but also address important issues of individuality, personal choices and societal pressure affecting self-reinvention and reception of these women within their societies. The analysis of under-researched yet powerful contemporary women writers makes this an important addition to the existing literary debates on varied women’s identities in fiction. I identify existing trends and evolving trends which help to map the emerging changes, making it a significant contribution to the understanding of the development of contemporary South Asian American women’s literature as a distinct body of work.
22
Akkoor, Chitra Venkatesh. "Ways of speaking in the diaspora: Afghan Hindus in Germany." Diss., University of Iowa, 2011. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/915.
Full textAbstract:
In this ethnographic study, I sought to understand the diasporic lives of Afghan Hindus by studying how they discursively constructed their migration and settlement in Germany. By directing attention to their ways of speaking about migration I understood the importance of community and family to the Afghan Hindu way of life, and how the cultural premises of homeland an integral part of their relationships in the diaspora. Speech codes theory is the primary theoretical framework for this ethnographic study.
Research was conducted over four separate visits to Germany lasting from four to ten weeks, beginning in summer of 2005 and ending in December 2008, proceeding in phases. Primary methods used were, participation observation, and in-depth interviews. Sites of research included Afghan Hindu temples and family events.
The main indigenous term used to describe migration was bikharna, which captured spatial dispersal, relational fragmentation, and loss of traditions. The Afghan Hindu meaning of community was premised on physical proximity and relational connection among Afghan Hindus.
The changing meaning of family from the multi-member, multi-generational household of Afghanistan to Western ideas of the nuclear family also figured prominently in ways of speaking about migration. Cultural premises of the homeland continued to inform life in Germany, but were also increasingly being challenged by lifestyle choices of some Afghan Hindus.
The temple in Afghan Hindu diasporic lives emerged as an important place, in discursive constructions of community. What was once a place of worship in the homeland was constructed in the diaspora as a place that could bring the fragmented community together. However, the temple was also contested space, as different groups of people within the speech community had different perspectives on its importance in Afghan Hindu lives.
This study has implications for the study of culture, communication and relationships in the context of diaspora. Ethnography of communication offers an ideal theoretical framework in which to understand diasporic experiences, by examining the underlying rules and premises of everyday lives of diasporic people. As a case study of a refugee diaspora, this study also has implications for scholarship on South Asian diasporas.
23
Stefani, Debora. "Resisting Diaspora and Transnational Definitions in Monique Truong's the Book of Salt, Peter Bacho's Cebu, and Other Fiction." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2012. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/81.
Full textAbstract:
Even if their presence is only temporary, diasporic individuals are bound to disrupt the existing order of pre-structured communities they enter. Plenty of scholars have written on how identity is constructed; I investigate the power relations that form when components such as ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, class, and language intersect in diasporic and transnational movements. How does sexuality operate on ethnicity so as to cause an existential crisis? How does religion function both to reinforce and to hide one's ethnic identity? Diasporic subjects participate in the resignification of their identity not only because they encounter (semi)-alien, socio-economic and cultural environments but also because components of their identity mentioned above realign along different trajectories, and this realignment undoubtedly affects the way they interact in the new environment. To explore this territory, I analyze Monique Truong's The Book of Salt, Peter Bacho's Cebu, Linh Dinh's "Prisoner with a Dictionary" and "'!'," and Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land.
24
Menon, Anita. "South Asian youth in the Canadian diaspora: media influences on identity development from Hollywood to Bollywood." Thesis, McGill University, 2010. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=86978.
Full textAbstract:
This study explores identity construction for first-generation South Asian youth growing up in the Canadian diaspora. Attention is placed on the influence of competing medias in shaping hybrid or dual identities that blend the home and mainstream cultures. This study takes particular interest in what is not being represented. The images of South Asians portrayed by Western media and Bollywood characterize only a slice of the South Asian population, homogenizing an heterogeneous group of peoples. This study explores the effect that the homogenization process has on South Asian-Canadian youth that are misrepresented in Hollywood and unrepresented in Bollywood through a phenomenological examination of lived experience through autoethnography.Cette étude explore la construction d'identité de la première génération des jeunes de l'Asie du sud qui ont grandi dans la diaspora canadienne. L'attention est établie sur l'influence des médias qui font concurrence pour modeler les identités hybrides ou doubles qui mélangent le pays natal avec les cultures traditionnelles. Cette étude s'intéresse en particulier à ce qui n'est pas représenté. Les images des sud-asiatiques représentées par la média occidentale et Bollywood dépeignent juste une partie de la population sud-asiatique, ce qui homogénéise un groupe hétérogène de personnes. Cette étude examine l'effet de l'homogénéisation sur les jeunes sud-asiatiques qui sont mal représentés à Hollywood et non-représentés à Bollywood à travers un examen phénoménologique des expériences vécues par autoethnographie.
25
Nilsson, Lauren Camilla. "Indo chic: Cultural Appropriation, Online Activism and Diasporic South Asian Cultural Identity in Australia." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2022. https://hdl.handle.net/2123/29597.
Full textAbstract:
My research tracks and interrogates the many manifestations of the aesthetic tradition ‘Indo chic’, analysing how South Asian diasporic (desi) communities in the West interact with the trend, and in particular, how the trend has led desi women to engage in political activism online. The term ‘Indo chic’ refers to the Western production and consumption of 'South Asian/Indian inspired' commodities and images that connote a specific, yet generic, 'exotic cool' such as yoga or Bindis. Using a mixed methodology of critical visual analysis and ethnographic interviews, I examine how the aesthetics of contemporary Indo chic affect the cultural identity of desi women living in the West, with a particular focus on the experiences of desi women living in Australia. Broadening the category of diasporic South Asian identity, I also engage with mixed-race diasporic South Asian relationships to Indo chic which illuminate the messiness and constructedness of culture as embodied experience. As such, this project situates itself within wider arguments concerning the diasporic experience, whiteness and racial privilege, online activisms, and cultural authenticity.
26
Highland, Jacqueline M. "Asian migrant writers in Australia and the negotiation of the third space." Thesis, Edith Cowan University, Research Online, Perth, Western Australia, 2011. https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/156.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis is a comparative study of three selected texts by Australian novelistsYasmine Gooneratne, A Change of Skies,(1991) Adib Khan, SeasonalAdjustments (1994) and Brian Castro, Birds of Passage ((1983). All three writersexplore the experiences and perceptions of their protagonists in relating to thelandscape, people and cultural traditions within the Australian context into whichthey have migrated from different Asian countries. Brian Castro’s centralcharacters, Lo Yun Shan and Seamus O’Young, are drawn from two contexts, theformer from the 19th century China while the latter is a contemporary Australianborn Chinese. Gooneratne’s and Khan’s protagonists hail from South-East Asiancontexts, which are again interestingly different, Gooneratne’s character beingfrom Sri Lanka and Khan’s from Bangladesh. From the multiplicity of culturesfrom which these texts emerge with their inevitable movements of theprotagonists between the originary and adoptive homes, there seems to be areaching towards a necessary ‘inter’ space, what Homi Bhabha calls the ‘ThirdSpace.’ In terms of perception of identity and belonging this borderline positionwould appear to be crucial to the diasporic condition. (1994, p. 53) While thisstudy explores the problematics, accommodations, resolutions and synergiesinvolved in the experience of negotiating this liminal space and living whatRushdie calls a ‘translated’ existence, (1991, p. 17) the focus is on particularprocesses crucial to that translation.
My study will suggest that the arrival at the ‘Third Space’ is represented neitheras a benign experience of adaptation to a different sense of home nor a sense ofbeing relegated to a state of permanent loss and alienation. Rather it will beapparent that the migrant experience is more mosaic than formulaic resisting neatdefinitions of movement from an initial sense of estrangement from the hostnation to accommodation and assimilation within the new society. It seems thateach individual character is poised on different and differing configurations ofcultural allegiances and identities within the’ Third Space’. The representationand perception of the’ Third Space’ ‘in relation to the performance of identity as iteration and the recreation of self…[particularly in terms of] the desire forrecognition’ (Bhabha, 2004, p.12) appears more diverse than originally envisagedby Bhabha. There appears to be a plurality of articulations within thisformulation, suggesting it is not a single, homogenous in-between space but aconstellation of ‘Third Spaces’, fluid and changing, overriding the possibility of a‘happy hybridity’ which, in any case. most theorists in the field find an untenableconcept. The tracing of this highly complex . inter-related and entangled plethoraof experiences which constitute the fate of the migrant will be explored in depthand detail in this thesis. Finally, no arrival at certain certainties is promised at itsconclusion; only, possibly, a heightening of awareness, an expansion ofunderstanding.. This provides an opportunity to revisit, indeed to rethink thecomplexities of migrant experience as not only transcending dichotomies ofinsider/outsider, belonging/alterity which are encoded in the narrative of a nation,while simultaneously affirming the processes of hybridity as crucial to theformation of a ‘double selved’ identity.
27
Hossain, Mohammad Delwar. "IN THE WEB WE CONNECT: USES OF SOCIAL MEDIA AMONG THE SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA IN THE U.S." OpenSIUC, 2014. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/dissertations/904.
Full textAbstract:
Social media usage is a paradigm shift in mass communication history, and members of the diasporic communities use social media for building and maintaining relationships. Social media have taken an important step by allowing the users to communicate in their native languages online. Because of this new step, communication through social media has become easier for the diasporic people who lack language and communication skills in their host countries. The diasporic people can communicate with the members of the same diasporic community in the host society and also with friends and family back home by using their native languages. Diasporic people have various motivations for using social media including gratifications. This dissertation examines patterns of use of social media among the South Asian diaspora living in the U.S. In doing so, the study uses a broader framework of bridging and bonding social capital to examine how South Asian people in the U.S. maintain relationships with friends both back home and in their host society via social media. Moreover, the influence of language for socio-cultural adjustment of the South Asian immigrant people was also explored in this study. An online survey following a snowballing technique was conducted among 535 South Asian people in the U.S. The results found that bonding relationships are related to native language use in social media, information sharing about back home and frequencies of social media use. Bridging relationships are related to relationship maintenance with friends in the U.S. and frequencies of social media use. The results of this study show the English language preference is not related to cultural and psychological behaviors in social media. However, English language preference is related to home country media related behaviors.
28
Priyanimal, Karunanayake Dinidu. "GEOPOLITICS OF FORGERY: LITERATURE, CULTURE AND MEMORY OF THE POSTCOLONIAL SOUTH ASIAN SECURITY STATE." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2019. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami156354614875673.
Full text
29
Dinnerstein, Noe. "Ladakhi traditional songs| A cultural, musical, and literary study." Thesis, City University of New York, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3601923.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation examines the place of traditional songs in the Tibetan Buddhist culture of the former Himalayan kingdom of Ladakh. I look at how Buddhism and pre-Buddhist religion informed the texts and performance contexts of traditional songs, and how Ladakhi songs represent cultural self-images through associated musical, textual, and visual tropes. Many songs of the past, both from the old royal house and the rural Buddhist populations, reflect the socio-political structure of Ladakhi society. Some songs reflect a pan-Tibetan identity, connecting the former Namgyal dynasty to both the legendary King Gesar and Nyatri Tsangpo, the historical founder of the Tibetan Yarlung dynasty. Nevertheless, a distinct Ladakhi identity is consistently asserted. A number of songs contain texts that evoke a mandala or symbolic representation of the world according to Vajrayana Buddhist iconography, ritual and meditative visualization practices. These mandala descriptions depict the social order of the kingdom, descending from the heavens, to the Buddhist clergy, to the king and nobles, to the common folk.
As the region has become more integrated into modern India, Ladakhi music has moved into modern media space, being variously portrayed through scholarly works, concerts, mass media, and the internet. An examination of contemporary representations of “tradition” and ethnic identity in traditional music shows how Ladakhis from various walks of life view the music and song texts, both as producers and consumers.
Situated as it was on the caravan routes between India, Tibet, China, and Central Asia, Ladakhi culture developed distinctive hybrid characteristics, including in its musical styles. Analysis of the performance practices, musical structures, form, and textual content of songs clearly indicates a fusion of characteristics of Middle Eastern, Balti, Central Asian, and Tibetan origin. Looking at songs associated with the Namgyal dynasty court, I have found them to be part of a continuum of Tibetan high literary culture, combined with complex instrumental music practices. As such, I make the argument that these genres should be considered to be art music.
30
Alrawashdeh, Abeer Aser. "A comparative study of selected Arab and South Asian colonial and postcolonial literature." Thesis, Swansea University, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.678267.
Full text
31
Banerjee, Rita. "The New Voyager: Theory and Practice of South Asian Literary Modernisms." Thesis, Harvard University, 2013. http://dissertations.umi.com/gsas.harvard:11044.
Full textAbstract:
My dissertation, The New Voyager: Theory and Practice of South Asian Literary Modernisms, investigates how literary modernisms in Bengali, Hindi, and Indian English functioned as much as a turning away and remixing of earlier literary traditions as a journey of engagement between the individual writer and his or her response to and attempts to re-create the modern world. This thesis explores how theories and practices of literary modernism developed in Bengali, Hindi, and Indian English in the early to mid-20th century, and explores the representations and debates surrounding literary modernisms in journals such as Kallol, Kavita, and Krittibas in Bengali, the Nayi Kavita journal and the Tar Saptak group in Hindi, and the Writers Workshop group in English. Theories of modernism and translation as proposed by South Asian literary critics such as Dipti Tripathi, Acharya Nand Dulare Bajpai, Buddhadeva Bose, and Bhola Nath Tiwari are contrasted to the manifestos of modernism found in journals such as Krittibas and against Agyeya's defense of experimentalism (prayogvad) from the Tar Saptak anthology. The dissertation then goes on to discuss how literary modernisms in South Asia occupied a vital space between local and global traditions, formal and canonical concerns, and between social engagement and individual expression. In doing so, this thesis notes how the study of modernist practices and theory in Bengali, Hindi, and English provides insight into the pluralistic, multi-dimensional, and ever-evolving cultural sphere of modern South Asia beyond the suppositions of postcolonial binaries and monolingual paradigms.
32
Kurian, Alka. "The female diasporic imagination : A creative and socio-cultural expoliration ot he south Asian diaspora in fiction and film." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.504627.
Full text
33
Rizwan, Muhammad. "Acculturation and food consumption of South Asian diaspora in the UK : moderating influence of religious identity and the neighbourhood." Thesis, Middlesex University, 2017. http://eprints.mdx.ac.uk/21629/.
Full textAbstract:
The increasing globalization and migration enabled people to move beyond their national boundaries for improved life and better economic opportunities. This has resulted in the changed national demographic landscape in the UK. Currently, the UK is hosting more than 10% ethnic minorities, and the South Asians constitute an ethnic group. Living in a dissimilar culture may cause an acculturative stress on the immigrants. They may undergo the process of adapting to a new culture. On the contrary, some individuals may attempt to maintain their heritage culture. Both scenarios have implications on their consumer behaviour. The studies in acculturation have explicated the process of acculturation, however, a few shed lights on the influences on the process itself. This study aims to investigate the factors that may accelerate the acculturation process or otherwise and the relationship between the degree of acculturation and food consumption. This study applies to the individuals who belong to South Asian countries (including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh). Drawing upon existing literature 22 hypotheses were developed. Data was collected from a sample of 924 South Asian immigrants. The hypotheses were tested using SEM (structural equation modelling). The study found that the Religiosity has a strong negative influence on acculturation, followed by Age. The length of stay and income positively influences the acculturation. The level of Acculturation was measured with the help of 22 items on the five-point Likert scale. The data showed that the high level of acculturation positively influences the mainstream food consumption, and has a negative influence on the consumption of ethnic food. The moderating effects of Religious Identity and the neighbourhood suggest that an individual’s religious identity moderates the relationship between influences and acculturation as well as between the level of acculturation and food consumption. However, the data showed that the type of Neighbourhood moderates the relationship between income and acculturation, and between acculturation and the mainstream food consumption only.
34
Chowdhury, Amitava. "Horizons of memory a global processual study of cultural memory and identity of the South Asian indentured labor diaspora in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean /." Online access for everyone, 2008. http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Dissertations/Summer2008/a_chowdhury_060308.pdf.
Full text
35
Tran, Elizabeth. "Dragon Tiger Goat: A Novel." Ohio University / OhioLINK, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ohiou1584453224864606.
Full text
36
Kanjilal, Sucheta. "Modern Mythologies: The Epic Imagination in Contemporary Indian Literature." Scholar Commons, 2017. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/6875.
Full textAbstract:
This project delineates a cultural history of modern Hinduism in conversation with contemporary Indian literature. Its central focus is literary adaptations of the Sanskrit epic the Mahābhārata, in English, Hindi, and Bengali. Among Hindu religious texts, this epic has been most persistently reproduced in literary and popular discourses because its scale matches the grandeur of the Indian national imagining. Further, many epic adaptations explicitly invite devotion to the nation, often emboldening conservative Hindu nationalism. This interdisciplinary project draws its methodology from literary theory, history, gender, and religious studies. Little scholarship has put Indian Anglophone literatures in conversation with other Indian literary traditions. To fill this gap, I chart a history of literary and cultural transactions between both India and Britain and among numerous vernacular, classical, and Anglophone traditions within India. Paying attention to gender, caste, and cultural hegemony, I demostrate how epic adaptations both narrate and contest the contours of the Indian nation.
37
Cha, Frank Sung. "Southern Orientation: Reimagining Asian American Identity and Place in the Global South." W&M ScholarWorks, 2013. https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd/1539623363.
Full textAbstract:
Asians have been part of the American South's physical, cultural, and economic landscape since Reconstruction when plantation owners introduced Chinese immigrants to replace newly freed African Americans as their primary labor source. Nearly a century later, sweeping immigration reform led to the influx of thousands of Asian immigrants who transformed the region's social, economic, and physical landscapes. Southern Orientation: Reimagining Asian American Identity and Place in the Global South utilizes twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, film, and oral histories to investigate how the socio-spatial practices of Asians produce new iterations of place-bound identities that unsettle traditional notions of southern community. Drawing from spatial theory, cultural trauma, and ecocriticism, this dissertation argues that the appearance of the Asian engenders new anxieties and reawakens past anxieties about racial and ethnic integration in the post-Jim Crow South. However, the growing visibility of Asians in the region also hints at the possibility of new multiracial and multiethnic coalitions and new place-bound communal identities centered on the shared struggle against material, social, and spatial inequalities.;With the exception of a few studies, there is a noticeable lack of scholarship on Asian Americans in southern literature and film. But the increased focus on the South in a global context and the growing number of narratives depicting Asians living in the region are compelling reasons to further explore the ways in which Asians influence and are influenced by southern cultural practices. These recent texts highlight the global movements of peoples, cultures, and economies that mark the region as both a transformed and transformative place. Works including Monique Truong's short story "Kelly" (1991) and Cynthia Kadohata's children's novel Kira-Kira (2004) illustrate how the internationalization of southern locales can reintroduce segregationist practices as a means of safeguarding long-held communal boundaries based on racial, ethnic, and class differences. Other narratives such as Mira Nair's film Mississippi Masala (1991) and Cynthia Shearer's novel The Celestial Jukebox (2004) reveal how Asians are part of a larger narrative of exploitation, exclusion, and survival that interweaves the history of multiple "Souths.".;For Asians migrating to the American South, defining home often involves the complex interplay between stasis and movement, acceptance and opposition, remembering and forgetting. This study foregrounds the critical intersections between Southern studies and Asian American cultural politics in order to better understand how global processes influence the ways in which an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic population define, inhabit, and transform communities in the American South.
38
Vidnes, Thea. "Consuming expectations : an exploration of foodways in relation to health and maternity among Nepalis living in Norway." Thesis, Brunel University, 2017. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/14463.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis focuses on Nepalis living in Oslo and Ås, Norway, and ethnographically explores their food perceptions, habits and practices in relation to health and maternal health. With pre-existing experience of both biomedical and other understandings of health and wellbeing, the majority of my respondents could and did move between paradigms, on an individual basis deciding which to apply and when. Consequently, several demonstrated certain reasoned divergences from Norwegian state-endorsed dietary norms and expectations; differences that were, however, not simply reducible to ‘culture’. ‘Culture’ is shown here to be a favoured strategy of explanation within Norwegian public health research, which has dominated state health perceptions of all South Asians. Overall, four key arguments are advanced. Firstly, the need to disaggregate the category of ‘South Asian’, currently readily employed within public health research and policies worldwide to describe and problematise the foodways of highly diverse diaspora populations. The middle-class status of my Nepali respondents is delineated as a central example exposing the inaccuracy of such a homogenising generalisation. Secondly, that despite the hegemony of biomedical models of nutrition within health and ante-/postnatal wellbeing in Norway, my interlocutors moved between these and other ideas and practices of health and wellbeing. Describing their dietary habits and practices makes plain the narrowness of applying purely biomedically-predicated thinking to understanding these Nepalis’ foodways. Thirdly, that in ante-/postnatal care the biomedical model overprivileges the individual mother’s responsibility for her own health in order to benefit her child, ignoring the potential for alternative distributions of responsibility for, as well as emphasis on, both offspring and mother: the Nepalis I encountered showed a notable commitment to the mother’s wellbeing and also sense of pregnancy and postnatal care as a collective enterprise, relationally shaped. Fourthly, my Nepali respondents’ accounts provide a useful example demonstrating limitations to the perceived authority of Norwegian state advice on health in general. Well-informed and often highly educated, these Nepalis engaged only selectively with the state-endorsed guidance and services, instead drawing on other (re)sources – Nepali family and friends especially – to maintain health and wellbeing.
39
Majchrowicz, Daniel Joseph. "Travel, Travel Writing and the "Means to Victory" in Modern South Asia." Thesis, Harvard University, 2015. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:17467221.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation is a history of the idea of travel in South Asia as it found expression in Urdu travel writing of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though travel has always been integral to social life in South Asia, it was only during this period that it became an end in itself. The imagined virtues of travel hinged on two emergent beliefs: that travel was a requisite for inner growth, and that travel experience was transferable. Consequently, Urdu travel writers endorsed travel not to reach a particular destination but to engender personal development, social advancement and communal well-being. Authors conveyed the transformative power of travel to their readers through accounts that traced out their inner journeys through narratives of physical travel, an ideal echoed in an old proverb that re-emerged at this time: “travel is the means to victory.”
This study, which draws on extensive archival research from four countries, represents the most comprehensive examination of travel writing in any South Asian language. Through a diachronic analysis of a wealth of new primary sources, it indexes shifting valuations of travel as they relate to conceptualizations of the self, the political and the social. It demonstrates that though the idea of beneficial travel found its first expression in accounts commissioned by a colonial government interested in inculcating modern cosmopolitan aesthetics, it quickly developed a life of its own in the public sphere of print. This dynamic literary space was forged by writers from across the social spectrum who produced a profusion of accounts that drew inspiration from Indic, Islamic and European traditions. In the twentieth century, too, travel writing continued to evolve and expand as it adapted to the shifting dimensions of local nationalisms and successive international conflicts. In independent India and Pakistan, it broke new ground both aesthetically and thematically as it came to terms with the post-colonial geography of South Asia. Yet, throughout this history,Urdu travel writing continued to cultivate the idea that the journey was valuable for its own sake.Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
40
Kumar, Priya Haryant. "Ruptured nations, collective memory & religious violence : mapping a secularist ethics in post-partition South Asian literature and film." Thesis, McGill University, 2001. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=37904.
Full textAbstract:
This dissertation maps the emergence of a 'secularist ethics' in post-independence South Asian literature and film, an ethics which is a deeply felt poetic response to particular historical conjunctures marked by religio-nationalist conflict in the Indian subcontinent. It is my argument that literary and cultural productions, in striving to dream and envision a world free of violence, terror and religious intolerance, have some central contributions to make to contemporary intellectual and political debates on secularism. Through close readings of fictions by Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Mukul Kesavan, Bapsi Sidhwa, Saadat Hasan Manto, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, Rajinder Singh Bedi, Jamila Hashmi, Jyotirmoyee Devi, and Lalithambika Antherjanam, as well as films by M. S. Sathyu, Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Khalid Mohamed and Shyam Benegal, which are concerned to address the issue of peaceful co-existence between different religious communities and nations in the Indian subcontinent, I argue that literary and imaginative endeavors by way of their alternative secularist imaginaries enable us to begin to imagine the possibilities of more habitable futures. Significantly, the 'secularist' fictions and films I invite attention to in my project enable a revisioning of the secular in terms quite different from normative understandings of liberal secularism. Such a renewed secularism seeks to make visible the normalization and neutralization of majoritarian religious beliefs and practices as constitutive of the representative secular-nationalist self in post-Partition India; it also emerges, significantly, from a gendered critique of the deep-seated patriarchal norms underlying most religious communities. Responding to different moments of crisis, predominantly the Partition of India in 1947, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, and the destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992, the radical secularist poetics of these works call attention to the fundamentalist agenda of Hindu nationalism, the limit
41
Arora, Kulvinder. "Assimilation and its counter-narratives twentieth-century European and South Asian immigrant narratives to the United States /." Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 2006. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p3200730.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2006.Title from first page of PDF file (viewed March 1, 2006). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 240-248).
42
Anandan, Prathim. "Child/subject : children as sites of postcolonial subjectivity and subjection in post-Independence South Asian fiction in English." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.711768.
Full text
43
Yun, Kyoim. "Performing the sacred political economy and shamanic ritual on Cheju island, South Korea /." [Bloomington, Ind.] : Indiana University, 2007. http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:3278198.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. Folklore and Ethnomusicology, 2007.Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-09, Section: A, page: 4015. Advisers: Richard Bauman; Roger L. Janelli. Title from dissertation home page (viewed May 7, 2008).
44
Acciari, Monia. "Indo-Italian screens and the aesthetic of emotions." Thesis, University of Manchester, 2011. https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/indoitalian-screens-and-the-aesthetic-of-emotions(8474e0f3-3b05-4c43-a1fe-dbed7ef08b03).html.
Full textAbstract:
This thesis aims to shed light on the cultural and aesthetic implications of the relationship between Italy and India on and off the screens of Italy, following the expansion of Bollywood in Europe during the 90s. Bollywood's propagation abroad affected the identity of the South Asian diaspora, urban spaces and aesthetics which generated what Le Guellec - describing the arrival of Indians and Bollywood cinema to Paris - named as Bollywood/India mania. The study began with the exploration of the historical meaning of the term aesthetic in order to offer a contextualization on the sense of the aesthetic as a philosophy of art; furthermore, it established a background for further theoretical debate on South Asian diasporic identity formations within the entertainment industry of Italy. The research methods that predominated throughout this work were those of textual argumentation, aesthetic analysis, quantitative and qualitative questionnaires and interview data. The reasons for using different and interdisciplinary methods and approaches to offer an account on diasporic cultures, resided in the attempt to reveal the multiplicities of the "cultural and social" visible. The theoretical frame that this research intends to follow is through two quite distinct disciplines: aesthetic and cultural studies. The aim is to capitalise on the productive intersection of these two disciplines to analyse parts of the South Asian cultural text on the screen and beyond it as producers of transnational images imbued with melancholic memories and melancholically conceived spaces. This work will attempt to individuate the existence of representational patterns based on the aesthetic of melancholy with its nuances and metamorphoses, which represents, narrates and constructs South Asian and/or fused identities socially and culturally on the screens of Italy. The notion of semiosphere as elaborated by Jury Lotman, was utilised to define the cultural and dialogic dynamics of mainstream products that move constantly closer to each other generating original "formats" characterised by novel transnational and multiple identities. Throughout this thesis, the emphasis was placed on the "encounters", the "journeys" and the "sharing" of cultures, hence highlighting the possible conditions of belonging contemporaneously through multiple modalities: mentally, psychologically and experientially to multiplicities of cultures. In addition, the notion of "world culture" was contemplated in an attempt to practically support what Gilroy, in Black Atlantic, shaped as "inter-cultural" and translational formations.
45
Das, Anup Kumar. "Open Access to Knowledge and Information: Scholarly Literature and Digital Library Initiatives - the South Asian Scenario." UNESCO, New Delhi, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/106335.
Full textAbstract:
The South Asia sub-region is now in the forefront of the Open Access movement within developing countries in the world, with India being the most prominent partner in terms of its successful Open Access and Digital Library initiatives. Institutional and policy frameworks in India also facilitate innovative solutions for increasing international visibility and accessibility of scholarly literature and documentary heritage in this country.
This publication has its genesis in the recommendations and proceedings of UNESCO-supported international conferences and workshops including the 4th International Conference of Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL2001, Bangalore); the International Conferences on Digital Libraries (ICDL2004 & ICDL2006, New Delhi); and the International Workshop on Greenstone Digital Library Software (2006, Kozhikode), where many information professionals of this sub-region demonstrated their Digital Library and Open Access initiatives. This book describes successful digital library and open access initiatives in the South Asia sub-region that are available in the forms of open courseware, open access journals, metadata harvesting services, national-level open access repositories and institutional repositories. This book may be considered an authoritative Source-book on Open Access development in this sub-region.
46
De, Capitani Lucio <1990>. "World literature and the anthropological imagination : ethnographic encounters in European and South Asian writing, 1885-2016." Doctoral thesis, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/10579/14970.
Full textAbstract:
Gli studi letterari, con l’apertura del dibattito sulla world literature, sono alla ricerca di nuovi approcci comparativi. Una possibile strada in tal senso è rappresentata da un dialogo interdisciplinare con l’antropologia. La mia tesi si propone quindi di mappare le forme dell’immaginazione antropologica – i diversi insiemi di operazioni epistemiche che un individuo o un gruppo utilizzano per comprendere un altro culturale. Mi concentro su come l’immaginazione antropologica venga registrata in una serie di testi letterari di sei autori europei e indiani: Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Carlo Levi, Mahasweta Devi, Amitav Ghosh e Frank Westerman. Ogni capitolo mette a confronto due autori – un europeo e un indiano – che utilizzano o rappresentano simili modalità di immaginazione antropologica. Le tre modalità che tratto sono quella coloniale (Stevenson/Kipling), militante (Levi/Devi) e multidirezionale (Ghosh/Westerman). A livello teorico, mi avvalgo dei dibattiti sulla world literature e di vari studi storici e riflessione metodologiche all’interno dell’antropologia.
47
Ocita, James. "Diasporic imaginaries : memory and negotiation of belonging in East African and South African Indian narratives." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/80354.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2013.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This dissertation explores selected Indian narratives that emerge in South Africa and East Africa between 1960 and 2010, focusing on representations of migrations from the late 19th century, with the entrenchment of mercantile capitalism, to the early 21st century entry of immigrants into the metropolises of Europe, the US and Canada as part of the post-1960s upsurge in global migrations. The (post-)colonial and imperial sites that these narratives straddle re-echo Vijay Mishra‘s reading of Indian diasporic narratives as two autonomous archives designated by the terms, "old" and "new" diasporas. The study underscores the role of memory both in quests for legitimation and in making sense of Indian marginality in diasporic sites across the continent and in the global north, drawing together South Asia, Africa and the global north as continuous fields of analysis. Categorising the narratives from the two locations in their order of emergence, I explore how Ansuyah R. Singh‘s Behold the Earth Mourns (1960) and Bahadur Tejani‘s Day After Tomorrow (1971), as the first novels in English to be published by a South African and an East African writer of Indian descent, respectively, grapple with questions of citizenship and legitimation. I categorise subsequent narratives from South Africa into those that emerge during apartheid, namely, Ahmed Essop‘s The Hajji and Other Stories (1978), Agnes Sam‘s Jesus is Indian and Other Stories (1989) and K. Goonam‘s Coolie Doctor: An Autobiography by Dr Goonam (1991); and in the post-apartheid period, including here Imraan Coovadia‘s The Wedding (2001) and Aziz Hassim‘s The Lotus People (2002) and Ronnie Govender‘s Song of the Atman (2006). I explore how narratives under the former category represent tensions between apartheid state – that aimed to reveal and entrench internal divisions within its borders as part of its technology of rule – and the resultant anti-apartheid nationalism that coheres around a unifying ―black‖ identity, drawing attention to how the texts complicate both apartheid and anti-apartheid strategies by simultaneously suggesting and bridging differences or divisions. Post-apartheid narratives, in contrast to the homogenisation of "blackness", celebrate ethnic self-assertion, foregrounding cultural authentication in response to the post-apartheid "rainbow-nation" project. Similarly, I explore subsequent East African narratives under two categories. In the first category I include Peter Nazareth‘s In a Brown Mantle (1972) and M.G. Vassanji‘s The Gunny Sack (1989) as two novels that imagine Asians‘ colonial experience and their entry into the post-independence dispensation, focusing on how this transition complicates notions of home and national belonging. In the second category, I explore Jameela Siddiqi‘s The Feast of the Nine Virgins (1995), Yasmin Alibhai-Brown‘s No Place Like Home (1996) and Shailja Patel‘s Migritude (2010) as post-1990 narratives that grapple with political backlashes that engender migrations and relocations of Asian subjects from East Africa to imperial metropolises. As part of the recognition of the totalising and oppressive capacities of culture, the three authors, writing from both within and without Indianness, invite the diaspora to take stock of its role in the fermentation of political backlashes against its presence in East Africa.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie studie fokus op geselekteerde narratiewe deur skrywers van Indiër-oorsprong wat tussen 1960 en 2010 in Suid-Afrika en Oos-Afrika ontstaan om uitbeeldings van migrerings en verskuiwings vanaf die einde van die 19e eeu, ná die vestiging van handelskapitalisme, immigrasie in die vroeë 21e eeu na die groot stede van Europa, die VS en Kanada, te ondersoek, met die oog op navorsing na die toename in globale migrasies. Die (post-)koloniale en imperial liggings wat in hierdie narratiewe oorvleuel, beam Vijay Mishra se lesing van diasporiese Indiese narratiewe as twee outonome argiewe wat deur die terme "ou" en "nuwe" diasporas aangedui word. Hierdie proefskrif bestudeer die manier waarop herinneringe benut word, nie alleen in die soeke na legitimisering en burgerskap nie, maar ook om tot 'n beter begrip te kom van die omstandighede wat Asiërs na die imperiale wêreldstede loods. Ek kategoriseer die twee narratiewe volgens die twee lokale en in die volgorde waarin hulle verskyn het en bestudeer Ansuyah R Singh se Behold the Earth Mourns (1960) en Bahadur Tejani se Day After Tomorrow (1971) as die eerste roman wat deur 'n Suid-Afrikaanse en 'n Oos-Afrikaanse skrywe van Indiese herkoms in Engels gepubliseer is, en die wyse waarop hulle onderskeidelik die kwessies van burgerskap en legitimisasie benader. In daaropvolgende verhale van Suid-Afrika, onderskei ek tussen narratiewe at hul onstaan in die apartheidsjare gehad het, naamlik The Hajji and Other Stories deur Ahmed Essop, Jesus is Indian and Other Stories (1989) deur Agnes Sam en Coolie Doctor: An Autobiography by Dr. Goonam deur K. Goonam; uit die post-apartheid era kom The Wedding (2001) deur Imraan Covadia en The Lotus People (2002) deur Aziz Hassim, asook Song of the Atman (2006) deur Ronnie Govender. Ek kyk hoe die verhale in die eerste kategorie spanning beskryf tussen die apartheidstaat — en die gevolglike anti-apartheidnasionalisme in 'n eenheidskeppende "swart" identiteit — om die aandag te vestig op die wyse waarop die tekste sowel apartheid- as anti-apartheid strategieë kompliseer deur tegelykertyd versoeningsmoontlikhede en verdeelheid uit te beeld. Post-apartheid verhale, daarenteen, loof eerder etniese selfbemagtiging met die klem op kulturele outentisiteit in reaksie op die post-apartheid bevordering van 'n "reënboognasie", as om 'n homogene "swartheid" voor te staan. Op dieselfde manier bestudeer ek die daaropvolgende Oos-Afrikaanse verhale onder twee kategorieë. In die eerste kategorie sluit ek In an Brown Mantle (1972) deur Peter Nazareth en The Gunny Sack (1989) deur M.G. Vassanjiin, as twee romans wat Asiërs se koloniale geskiedenis en hul toetrede tot die post-onafhanklikheid bedeling uitbeeld (verbeeld) (imagine), met die klem op die wyse waarop hierdie oorgang begrippe van samehorigheid kompliseer. In die tweede kategorie kyk ek na The Feast of the Nine Virgins (1995) deur Jameela Siddiqi, No Place Like Home (1996) deur Yasmin Alibhai en Migritude (2010) deur Shaila Patel as voorbeelde van post-1990 verhale wat probleme met die politieke teenreaksies en verskuiwings van Asiër-onderdane vanuit Oos-Afrika na wêreldstede aanspreek. As deel van die erkenning van die totaliserende en onderdrukkende kapasiteit van kultuur, vra die drie skrywers – as Indiërs en as wêreldburgers – die diaspora om sy rol in die opstook van politieke teenreaksie teen sy teenwoordigheid in Oos-Afrika onder oënskou te neem.
48
Govender, Shanali Candice. "On the fringes of a diaspora : an appraisal of the literature on language diaspora and globalization in relation to a family of Tamil-speaking, Sri Lankan migrants to South Africa." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/3609.
Full textAbstract:
Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references.
While the language attitudes and reported behaviours of migrants have long been of interest to linguists, educationalists and sociologists, increased levels of global mobility and technological activity are changing the nature of migration. This mini-thesis considers competing paradigms of mobility including diaspora, transnationalism and super-diversity and emerges at the recognition that the shape of migration has changed considerably over the last 20 years, especially in the South African context. This new migration, characterised in this paper as a shift from diaspora to transnationalism, might have significant consequences for the way migrants conceptualise host countries and countries of origin. This study sought to investigate the language attitudes and behaviours of a family of recent Sri Lankan migrants to South Africa. The aim of the study was to describe their attitudes and reported language behaviours, and having done so, to consider whether, in theory, any of these language attitudes or behaviours might be related to longer-term language attitudes and behaviours such shift, maintenance or loss.
49
De, Beer Esther. "Spicing South Africa: representations of food and culinary traditions in South African contemporary art and literature." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/20027.
Full textAbstract:
Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2012.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Francoise Vergés comments in her essay Let’s Cook! that “one could write the history of a people, of a country, of a continent by writing the history of its culinary habits” (250 ). Vergés here refers to the extent to which food can be seen to document and record certain events or subjectivities. Exploring a wide range of texts spanning the late 1800s up to the post-apartheid present, this thesis focuses in particular on the ways in which “spice” as commodity, ingredient or symbol is employed to articulate and/or embed creole and diasporic identities within the South African national context. The first chapter maps the depiction of the “Malay” figure within cookery books, focussing on the extent to which it is caught up in the trappings of the picturesque. This visibility is often mediated by the figure’s proximity to food. These depictions are then placed in conversation with the conceptual artist Berni Searle’s photographic and video installations. Searle visually interrogates the stagnant modes of representation that accrue around the figure of the “Malay” and moves toward understandings of how food and food narratives structure cultural identity as complex and mutable. Chapter two shifts focus from the Cape to the ways in which “Indian Cuisine” became significant within the South African context. Here the Indian housewife plays a role in perpetuating a distinctive cultural identity. The three primary texts discussed in this chapter are the popular Indian Delights cookery book authored by the Women’s Cultural Group, Shamim Sarif’s The World Unseen and Imraan Coovadia’s The Wedding. Indian Delights. All illustrate the extent to which the realm of the kitchen, traditionally a female domain, becomes a space from which alternative subjectivities can be made. The kitchen as a place for cultural retention is explored further and to differing degrees in both The Wedding and The World Unseen. Ultimately, indentifying cultural heritage through food enables tracing alternative and intersecting cultural identities that elsewhere, are often left out for neat and new ethnic, cultural or national identities. The thesis will in particular explore the extent to which spices used within creole and/or diasporic culinary practices encode complex affiliations and connections. Tracing the intimacies and the disjunctures becomes productive within the postapartheid present where the vestiges of apartheid’s taxonomical impetus alongside a new multicultural model threaten to erase further the complexities and nuances of everyday life.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: In haar artikel Let’s Cook! wys Francoise Vergés daarop dat die geskiedenis van ‘n mens, ‘n land of selfs ‘n kontinent saamgestel sou kon word deur te skryf oor die geskiedenis van hulle kos en eetgewoontes (250).Vergés skep hier ‘n besef van individuele en sosiale identiteit wat deur kos geleenthede vasgevang kan word. Deur bronne vanaf die laat 1800’s tot die postapartheid periode te bestudeer, fokus hierdie navorsing spesifiek op die wyse waarop speserye as kommoditeit, inhoud of simbool gebruik word om die kreoolse en diasporiese identiteite in Suid Afrika te bevestig of te bevraagteken. Die eerste hoofstuk lewer ‘n uiteensetting en beskrywing, soos verkry uit kookboeke, van die stereotypes wat vorm om die Maleise figuur. Daar word konsekwent gefokus op die mate waarin die sigbaarheid van die Maleise identiteit verstrengel word in ‘n bestaande raamwerk van diskoerse. Die Maleise figure word dikwels meer sigbaar in die konteks van kos en eetgewoontes. Berni Searl se fotografiese en video installasies word gebruik om hierdie stereotiepiese visuele kodes te bevraagteken. Searle ontgin die passiewe wyse waarop die Maleise persoon visueel verbeeld word en beklemtoon dan hoe kos en gesprekke oor kos die kulturele identiteit kompleks en dinamies maak. Hoofstuk twee verskuif die klem vanaf die Kaap na die wyse waarop die Indiese kookkuns identiteit kry in die Suid Afrikaanse konteks. Die fokus val hier op die rol van die Indiese huisvrou en haar kombuis in die bevestiging en uitbou van ‘n onderskeibare kulturele identiteit. Die drie kern tekste wat in hierdie hoofstuk bespreek word is die wel bekende en populere Indian Delights kookboek wat saamgestel is deur die Women’s Cultural Group, Shamim Sarif se The World Unseen en Imraan Coovadia se The Wedding. Indian Delights toon verder die mate waarin die kombuis as primere domein van die vrou, ‘n ruimte bied vir die formulering van alternatiewe subjek posisies. Die kombuis bied ook geleentheid vir inherente subversie wat verder en op alternatiewe wyse ontgin word in die bronne The Wedding en The World Unseen. Deur kos te gebruik om kulturele identiteit te verstaan bied ook die geleentheid om kulturele oorvleueling te verstaan al mag sommige groepe beskou word as onafhanklik in hul oorsprong en identiteit. Hierdie navorsing gee spesifiek aandag aan die mate waarin speserye en die gebruik daarvan in kreoolse en diasporiese kookkuns die kompleksiteite, soortgelykhede, verskille en misverstande reflekteer. Dit is veral waardevol om te let op soortgelykhede en verskille gegee dat die apartheidstaksonomie van die verlede en die huidige multikulturele model die rykheid en subtiele nuanseerings van die daaglikse bestaan verder kan erodeer.
50
Mathur, Ashok. "Brown gazing, the pedagogy and practice of South Asian writing in Canada." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape9/PQDD_0020/NQ47902.pdf.
Full text