CFP: Towards a Diasporic Imagination of the Present: An Eternal Sense of Homelessness

Call for Publications

Theme: Towards a Diasporic Imagination of the Present
Subtitle: An Eternal Sense of Homelessness
Publication: Collection of Essays, published by Lies and Big Feet
Deadline: 15.10.2014

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This is a call for papers for a collection of essays that examines
and theorizes the notion of diaspora, imagined communities and
cultures, and trans-national/ethnic identities. The collection will
be published by Lies and Big Feet, an independent publishing house in
India.

For more information, please write to Tapati Bharadwaj:
[email protected]

In our modern world, where there is a constant to and fro movement of
culture, people and technology, discrete cultural identities are
giving way. Scholars like Arjun Appadurai and Anthony Giddens comment
on how national narratives “think” and “feel” beyond the nation to
create a “pluralized world-political” community. Such narratives
operate in global public spaces, made possible not only through
print, but new technologies of the internet, and constant mobility
(See Appadurai’s Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of
Globalization, 1996). The larger conundrum-like  question, then
becomes, what is national identity?

In Bangalore, India, where I live, there is a generation of Indian
children that is American. My son was born in Chicago, and we
returned back to India when he was 4 years old. Every few years, we
go and diligently visit the US consulate to renew his passport. My
parents moved from Bangladesh to India, post-Partition in 1947.
Before settling in Kolkata in the early 1980s, they had lived in the
United States in the 1950s-60s, Worli Seaface in Bombay, and
Venezuela. I grew up in an uber-brahmanical environment, reading
books which my father had bought from public libraries in the US, and
imaginatively participating in all the cultures which had been their
homes – Bangladesh, the Americas and India. When I studied in
Presidency College (erstwhile Hindoo College) in Calcutta, all my
professors were Ox-Bridge educated, and terribly snobbish. I learnt
more in the hallowed canteen of the college, where Cuba and the Naxal
movements were discussed with equal ease.

Where, and when exactly did Indian culture begin? Is the present the
beginning of the disappearance of discrete cultural identities, and
the acceptance of the fact that we are in a state of eternal
movement? An implication of modernity is the fact that we are
incredibly self-reflexive of our situated-ness and aware of global
affairs, and our neighbours, who might live thousands of miles away.
Has the world, therefore, become our family?

Length of essay: 8000 to 12000 words.
Please use Chicago Manual of Style.
Deadline for proposal of 250-400 words is October 15th 2014.
Submission would have to be complete by December 15th 2014.


Contact:

Tapati Bharadwaj
Lies and Big Feet
No. 894 / 4th Floor
1st A Main, 1st Block, Koramangala
Bangalore - 560034
India
Email: [email protected]
Web: