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25 mars 2022
- doi: 10.4000/books.pulm.10008
- isbn: 9782842699277
- eisbn: 9782367813905
https://www.openedition.org/12554 , info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Mots-clés
hybridité Caraïbe trauma Diaspora indienne Indo-Guyanais Indo-Caribéen amnésie océan indien hybridity Caribbean amnesia Indian Diaspora Indo-Guyanese Indo-Caribbean Indian Ocean trauma Literature HIS017000 HBJFCiter ce document
Vijay Mishra, « ‘In the Arcade of Hanuman House’: Ghostly Spectres in the Diaspora », Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, ID : 10.4000/books.pulm.10008
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Résumé
Diasporas are shadowed by ghostly spectres and every diaspora has its own narrative of these spectres. The paper returns to the earlier theorization of the diasporic imaginary, and uses key texts from the V. S. Naipaul corpus to re-think the links between diaspora, memory and the power of colonial discourses. The argument centres around a canonical passage from V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas which is used to open up traces in Naipaul often overlooked by postcolonial readings of the writer. If colonial English curriculum informs Naipaul’s discourse and shadows it, food and film (here Bombay/Bollywood cinema) take us to plantation diaspora life-worlds, which form the background to many of his novels. Naipaul’s phrase ‘in the arcade of Hanuman House’ functions as a metaphor for the space of the diaspora in which Bollywood films and plantation food are consumed and ‘celebrated’, as well as a code for a specific plantation diaspora literary discourse which locates itself ambivalently in the cusp of the colonial/postcolonial divide.