| This thesis first posits a theoretical distinction between two major historical waves of South Asian migration: the dispersal of South Asian peoples as "indentured labourers" or "passenger Indians" during the greater part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century to the colonies of the British Empire, and the more contemporary movements of South Asian peoples to the Western Hemisphere and Western Asia since the decolonization of the British Empire and a post-World War era. This thesis examines the nascent stage of novel production by the descendants of the first major wave of South Asian migration. In so doing, it focuses on "South Asian diasporic writers" whose historical genesis is directly or indirectly related to the phenomenon of "indentured labour," and whose novels are rooted in the diasporic location which their ancestors came to inhabit as colonial subjects and subsequently transformed over multiple generations.; Since its formation along the historical trajectory of indentured labour in a post-emancipation economy, the South Asian diaspora carries residual echoes of the African/Afro-Caribbean diaspora, which necessarily intersects its historical vector. The writers of the South Asian diaspora nonetheless assert a distinct diasporic imaginary that is commonly thematized in their early novels as a shared mythology of indenture, migration and (re)settlement; they also evoke a distinct diasporic consciousness that is paradoxically grounded in the critical juncture between ontological ambivalence and an essentializing politics of identity.; On the one hand, the novels examined in this thesis bring to view formal patterns, leit motifs, thematic concerns and tropes that are repeated across the body of South Asian diasporic writing; on the other hand, these novels are situated in numerous geopolitical regions which disclose national, linguistic, religious, socioeconomic and other factors of differentiation.; This thesis adds to rather than replicates the body of scholarship on writers of South Asian origins. This is because it brings into comparative focus a seemingly disparate group of writers whose distinctly "South Asian diasporic perspectives" serve as the structural and psychological cornerstone of their novels. These writers are Deepchand Beeharry (Mauritius), Peter Nazareth (Uganda), Farida Karodia (South Africa), Rooplall Monar (Guyana), Narmala Shewcharan (Guyana), Lakshmi Persaud (Trinidad), Sharlow Mohammed (Trinidad), K. S. Maniam (Malaysia) and Gopal Baratham (Singapore). (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
