Impossible Desires , livre ebook

263

pages

English

Ebooks

2005

Écrit par
Gopinath Gayatri Gopinath

Publié par
Duke University Press

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263

pages

English

Ebooks

2005

Lire un extrait

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne En savoir plus

Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

19 avril 2005

EAN13

9780822386537

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

By bringing queer theory to bear on ideas of diaspora, Gayatri Gopinath produces both a more compelling queer theory and a more nuanced understanding of diaspora. Focusing on queer female diasporic subjectivity, Gopinath develops a theory of diaspora apart from the logic of blood, authenticity, and patrilineal descent that she argues invariably forms the core of conventional formulations. She examines South Asian diasporic literature, film, and music in order to suggest alternative ways of conceptualizing community and collectivity across disparate geographic locations. Her agile readings challenge nationalist ideologies by bringing to light that which has been rendered illegible or impossible within diaspora: the impure, inauthentic, and nonreproductive.Gopinath juxtaposes diverse texts to indicate the range of oppositional practices, subjectivities, and visions of collectivity that fall outside not only mainstream narratives of diaspora, colonialism, and nationalism but also most projects of liberal feminism and gay and lesbian politics and theory. She considers British Asian music of the 1990s alongside alternative media and cultural practices. Among the fictional works she discusses are V. S. Naipaul's classic novel A House for Mr. Biswas, Ismat Chughtai's short story "The Quilt," Monica Ali's Brick Lane, Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy, and Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night. Analyzing films including Deepa Mehta's controversial Fire and Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding, she pays particular attention to how South Asian diasporic feminist filmmakers have reworked Bollywood's strategies of queer representation and to what is lost or gained in this process of translation. Gopinath's readings are dazzling, and her theoretical framework transformative and far-reaching.

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Publié par

Duke University Press

Date de parution

19 avril 2005

EAN13

9780822386537

Langue

English

Poids de l'ouvrage

1 Mo

Impossible Desires

Perverse Modernities

A series edited by Judith Halberstam

and Lisa Lowe

I M P O S S I B L E D E S I R E S

Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures

Gayatri Gopinath

Duke University Press Durham and London 2005

∫2005 Duke University Press

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper$

Typeset in Bembo by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

The distribution of this book is supported by

a generous grant from the Gill Foundation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication

Data appear on the last printed page

of this book.

for j. h.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments ix

1Impossible Desires: An Introduction 1

2Communities of Sound: Queering South Asian Popular Music in the Diaspora 29

3Surviving Naipaul: Housing Masculinity in A House for Mr. Biswas,Surviving Sabu, andEast Is East63

4Bollywood/Hollywood: Queer Cinematic Representation and the Perils of Translation 93

5Local Sites/Global Contexts: The Transnational Trajectories ofFireand ‘‘The Quilt’’ 131

6Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora:Funny Boyand Cereus Blooms at Night 161

7Epilogue: Queer Homes in Diaspora 187

Notes 195 Bibliography 221 Filmography 235 Index 237

AC K N OWL E D G M E N T S

This book is about home, and I have many people to thank for making me feel at home both intellectually and emotionally in disparate loca-tions, across many coasts and continents. The beginnings of this project date back to the early days of South Asian progressive activism in New York City in the late 1980s and 1990s. I feel privileged to have been part of a community of scholars, activists, and artists that made queer/progressive South Asian cul-ture and politics coalesce during those years. Among them are Ayisha Abra-ham, Haresh Advani, Faraz Ahmed, Radhika Balakrishnan, Vivek Bald, Ta-mina Davar, Sharmila Desai, David Kalal, Anita Nayar, and Saeed Rahman. Rekha Malhotra and Geeta Javeri generously shared their passion for and encyclopedic knowledge of South Asian popular music with me. I have bene-ﬁted from Javid Syed’s brilliance as both an activist and scholar; much of my thinking on queer representation in popular Indian cinema is indebted to our joint clip show and lecture presentation, ‘‘Desi Dykes and Divas: Alternative Sexualities in Popular Indian Cinema,’’ originally commissioned by the 1997 Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in New York City. Chandan Reddy’s friendship and intellectual generosity have greatly enhanced the quality of both my life and work. Ann Wightman and Indira Karamcheti at Wesleyan University provided me early on with a model of impassioned and committed pedagogy that has stayed with me to this day. As a graduate student at Columbia University, I was

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