South Asian Diaspora Fiction in Britain

Paper Code: 
ENG 144 (a) - Option 8

Unit I      

Diaspora: Notions of ‘Home’, ‘Homelands’ and ‘Exile’

Unit II    

Diaspora in the Global Context; Notion of ‘Identity’                   

Primary texts for Units I and II: 

Salman Rushdie’s “Imaginary Homelands” 

Edward Said’s “Reflections on Exile”

Excerpts from Jopi Nyman’s (2009) Home, Identity and Mobility in Contemporary Diasporic Fiction, pub. by Editions Rodopi B. V.

Fludernik, M. (2003). “Imagined Communities as Imaginary Homelands: The South-Asian Diaspora” in Fiction in Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Common Traditions and New Developments.  Ed. Monica Fludernik, pp. 261-285.

The novels in Units III, IV and V will be studied with a focus on issues related to diaspora.

Unit III      

Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003)

Unit IV      

Ravinder Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman (1987)

Unit V        

Atima Srivastava’s Looking for Maya (2000)  

Source Books: 

Reading List:

Bhabha, H. (1994). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. 

Upstone, Sara (2010). British Asian Fiction : Twenty-First-Century Voices, Manchester Univ. Press.

Mishra, Vijay. (2007)  The Literature of the Indian Diaspora. New York: Routledge.   

Fludernik, M. (2003). “Imagined Communities as Imaginary Homelands: The South-Asian Diaspora” in Fiction in Diaspora and Multiculturalism: Common Traditions and New Developments. Ed. Monica Fludernik. pp. 261-285.

Academic Year: 
2019-2020