Reframing Diaspora: A Post-Colonial Reading of Women's Travel Narratives

Zerin Alam

《文山評論：文學與文化》 12卷2期 (2019/06) Pp. 53-80

https://doi.org/10.30395/WSR.201906_12(2).0003

摘要

Diaspora studies currently engage with contemporary globalization and migrant experiences in Western metropoles. Diaspora writing, however, has a long history rooted in the colonial archive. My aim is to analyze the impact of diaspora on colonial women's travels using a post-colonial approach. This paper will focus on the narratives of both Indian and British women including Emily Eden (Up the Country, 1866), Anne Wilson (Letter from India, 1911), Krishnabhabini Das (Englanday Bangamahila, 1885) and Janaki Majumdar (A Family History, 1935) to analyze the impact of diaspora on gender identity. Both groups underwent psychic trauma and fracturing of identities when they were transplanted to alien environments. Drawing on Homi Bhabha's theory of hybridity, I interpret the recurrence of hybridization, trauma of maternal loss, and yearning for home as representations of diasporic consciousness in the two groups of women. I extend the parameters of diaspora studies by incorporating the writing of Western women and by shifting the gaze to the historical archive of colonial writing. My analysis will reframe diaspora studies and reorient current notions of whose experiences count as diaspora.

關鍵字

travel narratives ； gender ； diaspora ； hybridity ； nostalgia ； trauma

參考文獻

Agnew, Eadoin. Imperial Women Writers in Victorian India: Representing Colonial Life, 1850-1910. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Alam, Zerin. “Tangled Encounters with the Indian Other: English Women Travel Writers Confronting India.” Language, Literature and Community, special issue of Crossings, 2015, pp. 3-11.

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Ashcroft, Bill, et al., editors. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2006.

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