War, Divide and Cultural Identity in Contemporary Diasporic Writing

Unit I

Ethnicity, Borders and the Nation

Source:  

· ‘Ethnicity in an Age of Diaspora’ by R. Radhakrishnan 

(from Braziel & Mannur’s edited Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader)   

· ‘The Diaspora Zeroes in on the Borders’ 

(from Jasbir Jain’s The Diaspora Writes Home: Subcontinental Narratives)

· ‘Movements and Migrations’ 

(from Edward W. Said’s Culture and Imperialism)

Unit II

Childhood, Family and Identity 

Source:  

· ‘Writing Home: Memory, History and Imagined Spaces’

(from Jasbir Jain’s The Diaspora Writes Home…)

· ‘Reconstructing Time and Experience: Variations on the Theme of Dislocation’ by Tej N. Dhar 

(from Jasbir Jain’s edited Dislocations and Multiculturalisms )

· ‘Introduction’ to ‘Youth and the Evolution of Identity’ 

(from Erik H. Erikson’s Childhood and Society)

Unit III

Terrorism, Conflict and Dislocation 

Source:  

· ‘The Collapse of “Cultural Maps”: Terrorism in Asian Literature’ 

(from Usha Bande’s Culture, Nature and Literature)

· ‘Aesthetics of Dislocation and Dislocation of Aesthetics’ by Santosh Gupta 

(from Jasbir Jain’s edited Dislocations and Multiculturalisms)

· ‘The Civilization of Clashes’ 

(from Arjun Appadurai’s Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger)

Unit IV

Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003), A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007), and And the Mountains Echo (2013) 

Unit V

Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers (2004), The Wasted Vigil (2008) and The Blind Man’s Garden (2013)