Contemporary Diasporic Literature: Writing History, Culture, Self

Contemporary Diasporic Literature: Writing History, Culture, Self addresses a seminal change that has presided over the late twentieth century literary history.  Conceding that exile, immigration and homelessness are primordial human conditions submitting to a literary/aesthetic resolution or interrogation, this volume underlines their contemporary, centralizing,  homogenizing effect on culture and self on the one hand, and the numerous examples of new and different, often syncretic and hybrid, cultural forms and their iteration on the other.  As several studies by scholars in this volume substantiate, in the diasporic ‘postnational imaginary’ the official and absolutist constructions of ethnic/cultural/ historical are startlingly replaced by dialogic, intercultural, transnational and other media-related ‘technologies’, al of which move towards interrogative, contested models.  They promise to project how the diaspora-related cultural-economic-political mutations have had a decisive, revisionary impact on the discipline of literary/critical studies.  Among first of its kind of India, the present anthology of critical essays is bound to prove valuable for academics, students and researchers.