East African Indian Writing and the Worlding of Diasporas

Abstract

This paper proceeds from the understanding that artworks can constitute worlds that are different from present realities. In this process of world-making, art and literature, in general, constitute fictional spaces that either contest the existing ones or are relational to them. What this means, then, is that the process of “worlding” can equally be understood as that of undoing hegemonic formations and spaces. This article explores how diasporic writings produce political and cultural realities—imagined and utopic—that contest and transform relations based on national rootedness and territorial logic. I will use the term “world-making” to mean the artworks’ ability to contest and transform existing relations of power—whether or not these relations are subsumed under such categories as gender, religion, ethnicity, nation, class, or race—to call alternative temporalities into being. In this sense, I take diaspora-making as a constitutive process that seeks to challenge certain dominant premises,including capitalist globalization, that structure being in the world or being of the world.