Homemaking: Radical Nostalgia and the Construction of a South Asian Diaspora

2017 | Essays

Theoretical work in diaspora studies often concludes that nostalgia must be an idealizing, conservative form of memory so it has been marginalized within the field in favour of hybridity. But what radical possibilities might exist in the construction of coherent and fixed forms of diasporic identity? Homemaking: Radical Nostalgia and the Construction of a South Asian Diaspora examines diasporic life in south Asian communities in the US and the UK to map the ways in which members of these communities use nostalgia to construct distinctive identities. The book looks at literature, television and film, food, virtual spaces, and the built environment and uses a mixture of methodological approaches, including ethnography, archival work, and intertextual scholarship to offer an interdisciplinary approach to the construction of identity through nostalgia. It argues that, in the context of enforced assimilation on the part of the post-imperial nation-state, the nostalgic hanging-on to an imaginary version of one's own identity can be seen to be radical. It argues that this illustrates how nostalgia can serve as a powerful form of counter-hegemony. nic for

Anindya Raychaudhuri (Author)