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Representing the Poetics of Resistance in Transnational South Asian Women's Fiction and Film

Many women of the South Asian diaspora address issues of displacement and "race redoubling" as Indians, Asians, Africans or blacks in the United Kingdom and the United States of America, where ideas of "diversity and multiculturalism," as opposed to "difference," (Bhabha 1994: 34) prevail. How do we read such marginal writings, with their cultural border crossing, where meanings, as Bhabha claims, are never complete or are "open to cultural translation" (1994: 162-3), especially for South Asian women who negotiate for reconstruction of gender and national identities in an "ambiguous" territory, all the while retaining or "dragging" their sense of "Indianness-in-motions?" (Appadurai 10) Are there possibilities for the articulation of new identities in transnational diasporic spaces? My paper examines the poetics of resistance to gendered identity constructions in the texts of women writers of the South Asian diaspora and their inter-connections to India and Africa. How are racial and ethnic identities constructed within diasporic spaces in an era of globalization with its transnational cultural flow? This in tum leads to a discussion of how such constructions impact the gender and national identity formation of diasporic South Asian women. How do women of Indian descent negotiate for gender identity and empowerment in shifting territories of first and third world diasporic spaces, when they are first displaced from their "home" cultures and then alienated in another? In order to discuss gender and national identity, one must first ask some important questions regarding the construction of identities in postcolonial and, indeed, transnational spaces. What kind of new cultural forms are engendered in such spaces and why? Obviously my paper does not