Post-colonial re-presentations of gendered Indian diasporic identities in the fictions of Suniti Namjoshi and Shani Mootoo

As literature in English has broadened to include writings from English-speaking countries all over the world, writers of Indian origin, like Salman Rushdie, Arundhuti Roy, and Jhumpa Lahiri have won much attention. Lesser-known among them are Suniti Namjoshi, from India, and Shani Mootoo, from Trinidad, whose fictions include lesbian issues as well. Within the post-colonial context however, such fictions provide a unique view of the relationships between the colonized and colonizers. Namjoshi and Mootoo's writings not only explore the identity complications brought about by migration from East to West or South to North, but they also provide a critical view of contending identities within cultures when lesbian and queer sexual orientations have to be considered. These writers of the Indian diaspora write the struggles and joys of forging post-colonial identities hybridized from and in-between their native and alien cultures in which they reside.; This dissertation considers Suniti Namjoshi's Goja and The Conversations of Cow and Shani Mootoo's "Out on Main Street" and Cereus Blooms at Night as narratives highlighting the non-static, plural, and fraught characteristics of identities, especially from a post-colonial perspective, in order to read the subversive resistances they pose to their cultures of origin as well as of residence after migration. In this context, the fictions have been read through theories at the crossroads of post-colonial and gender studies. Homi Bhabha treats colonial hybridity as an effect of subversive mimicry against colonial and neo-colonial power plays---a subversion that deconstructs limiting myths of racial and cultural purity. Nevertheless, Bhabha discusses colonial mimicry in an un-gendered, or masculine context. However, in conjunction with Judith Butler's theoretical explorations of gender ambiguity and "performative contradiction" that introduces previously censored voices in the normative such as heterosexuality, Bhabha's theory of resistance through hybridity can be read in terms of gender-trouble as well. As a result, a queered post-colonial hybridity emerges, which like a forked tongue, speaks to both the colonial legacy as well as homophobia. These theories, among others, help read Suniti Namjoshi and Shani Mootoo's fiction as complex narratives that question identity representation and emphasize the subversive role of repetition and re-presentation.