“In his 2007 book The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary, academi
“In his 2007 book The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary, academic Vijay Mishra writes of the new wave of upwardly mobile South Asian immigrants and their “uneasy postmodern trend towards collapsing diasporic (and historical) differences” in the postcolonial literature they produce. Kaur indeed seems to note little difference between her educated, Western, Indian-Canadian self and her ancestors, or even modern South Asian women of a similar age in rural Punjab. She suggests that the way all South Asian women move through life is universal, uniting herself with them by insistently returning focus to the South Asian female body as a locus of “shame and oppression” in her collection.While more female South Asian voices are indeed needed in mainstream culture and media, there is something deeply uncomfortable about the self-appointed spokesperson of South Asian womanhood being a privileged young woman from the West who unproblematically claims the experience of the colonized subject as her own, and profits from her invocation of generational trauma. There is no shame in acknowledging the many differences between Kaur’s experience of the world in 2017 and that of a woman living directly under colonial rule in the early 20th century. For example: neither is any more “authentically” South Asian. But it is disingenuous to collect a variety of traumatic narratives and present them to the West as a kind of feminist ethnography under the mantle of confession, while only vaguely acknowledging those whose stories inspired the poetry.”Read Chiara Giovanni on The Problem With Rupi KaurIllustration by Naya Chayenne -- source link
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