Diaspora and Syal’s Anita and Me Essay -- Diaspora Syal Anita Me Essay

Diaspora and Syal’s Anita and Me Diaspora, a term used to describe the dispersion of a people from their original homeland, has become an increasingly pertinent topic of discussion in contemporary society. Nalini Natarajan in the essay â€Å"Reading Diaspora† argues that â€Å"the phenomenon of diasporic populations is by no means new, but its scale in the twentieth century is dramatic† (xiii). Natarajan also argues that the nature of contemporary diasporic experiences, due to the global reach of technology and media is significantly more complex and ambivalent than earlier diasporic experiences. Literary works have become a major source of knowledge about Diaspora and Mishra Sudesh, the author of the essay â€Å"From Sugar to Masala: Writing by the Indian Diaspora† calls for a clear distinction between the old (sugar) and new (masala) diasporic movements. Sudesh argues that the old diasporic movement is marked by the semi-voluntary flight of Indians to non-metropolitan plantation colonies such as Fiji and Trinidad while the new diasporic movement is the post-modern dispersal of all Indian classes to thriving metropolitan centers such as the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. Sudesh claims that writers of the old diaspora tend to concentrate on the cracks within the experience while new diasporic writers tend to focus on â€Å"the liminal or threshold zone of intercutting subjectivities that define the experience of migrancy† (287). Sudesh places Meera Syal, the author of the novel Anita and Me, amongst the many writers of the new or masala Diasporas. Syal’s Anita and Me is a coming of age novel about a young girl, Meena, trying to cope with the inner and outer conflicts of a child of a minority culture facing both the temptati... ...h she may one day visit her parent’s homeland, India is not her home and neither is Britain. It is the space between these two countries, lifestyles, and cultures that has finally become her home. Works Cited Brah, Avtar. â€Å"Diaspora, Border and Transnational Identities.† Feminist Post-Colonial Theory. Ed. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills. New York: Routledge, 2003. Fludernik, Monica. Hybridity and Post-Colonialism. Germany: Stauffenburg and Veriag, 1998. Natarajan, Nalini. â€Å"Reading Diaspora.† Writers of the Indian Diaspora. Ed. Emmanual S. Nelson. Connecticut: Greenwich Press, 1993. Sudesh, Mishra. â€Å"From Sugar to Masala: Writing by the Indian Diaspora.† A History of Indian Literature in English. Ed. Arvind Krishna Melhotra. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Syal, Meera. Anita and Me. New York: The New Press, 1996.