Diaspora

Abstract

One of the most important social phenomena of the postcolonial era has been the migration and resettlement of peoples around the world, which has led to the creation of new diasporic cultural identities. These diasporic identities are complex formations, wherein groups of expatriates and their descendants undergo cultural and sociopolitical transformations while adapting to new environments. For South Asians, this process has led to the creation of diasporic communities all over the world, with developing diasporic film communities emerging in some areas as a result. Some key filmmakers in the South Asian diaspora include Gurinder Chadha, Mira Nair, Nisha Ganatra, and Deepa Mehta, along with screenplay writers like Hanif Kureishi and Kumail Nanjiani. Since the early 1990s, a rapidly expanding body of scholarship has appeared, focusing on documenting and theorising migration and the emergence of new transnational cultural formations. Scholars associated with theorising diaspora, such as Khachig Tololyan, Avtar Brah, Vijay Mishra and R. Radhakrishnan, have theorised and catalogued a wide array of diasporic communities, both traditional and ‘new’. This scholarship tends to take it as a given that diasporas can form for any number of reasons, and that diasporic status might relate to a broad array of social issues. As Tololyan put it in the inaugural issue of Diaspora, ‘We use “diaspora” provisionally to indicate our belief that the term once described as Jewish, Greek, and Armenian dispersion now shares meanings with a larger semantic domain that includes words like immigrant, expatriate, refugee, guest-worker, exile, community, overseas community, ethnic community’ (Tololyan, 1991, pp. 4–5). While there are obviously real differences between refugees and voluntary ethnic/immigrant communities, in diaspora studies their experiences are often understood under a single umbrella. More recently, scholars such as Vijay Mishra have theorised the workings of the South Asian diaspora in particular. Mishra draws an important distinction between what he calls the ‘old’ diaspora of Indian indentured labourers in Fiji, Malaysia, East Africa and the Caribbean (Trinidad, Guyana) and the ‘new’ South Asian diaspora that has emerged with ‘late capital’ (Mishra, 1996, p. 421). Mishra describes the old Indian diaspora as ‘exclusive’, as it tended to simply reproduce ‘little Indias’ – islands of static cultural and relative linguistic homogeneity – while the new diaspora is much more likely to see hybridity, linguistic shifts, acculturation and extensive interaction with host cultures. Scholars such as Gayatri Gopinath have also linked the liberatory possibilities of new configurations of South Asian diasporic life to expanded prospects