This article appears in the following Contemporary Women's Writing issue: SPECIAL ISSUE: DIASPORA [View the issue table of contents]
Introduction: Unsettling Women
University of Leicester, UK ep27{at}le.ac.uk
The essays gathered together here, in the first Special Issue of Contemporary Women's Writing, emerge from the second biennial conference of the Contemporary Women's Writing Network (CWWN), "Unsettling Women: Contemporary Women's Writing and Diaspora," held at the University of Leicester, UK, 11–13 July, 2008.1 The event, which was attended by delegates from more than fifteen countries, included papers on over seventy writers plus plenary lectures by Carole Boyce Davies, Sneja Gunew, Deborah Madsen, and Susheila Nasta, and featured discussions with the multi-award-winning writers Jackie Kay and Linda Grant, as well as readings by Jacqueline Roy and the performance poet Shamshad Khan. By celebrating the international range of contemporary women's writing, exploring issues of critical, theoretical and pedagogical concern relating to writing by women published since 1970, and enabling connections between authors and academics, the event reflected the key aims of the network.2 As part of CWWN's broader remit to encourage and support research in this relatively recent and rapidly expanding area of intellectual enquiry (particularly amongst a new generation of scholars), the conference also offered an occasion to launch the Contemporary Women's Writing Network Prize for the best paper delivered by a postgraduate student.3
The theme of the conference developed from a recognition that some of the most interesting and exciting writing published by women in recent years is about, or grows out of, diaspora: Jhumpa Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize for Interpreter of Maladies (1999), a collection of short stories about the Indian diaspora. Switching between two landscapes, a Himalayan mountain village and Manhattan, Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss (2006) also examines Indian migration, and won the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award as well as the Man Booker Prize. Stories about the Chinese diaspora feature in Yiyun Li's A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (2006), which won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and the Kiriyama Prize (amongst others). Ann Enright's The Gathering (2007), a family saga set in Ireland and England, won the Booker the year after Desai, and Linda Grant's The Clothes on their Backs (2008), which examines the fate of Jewish immigrants in Britain, was on the shortlist the year after that. Also in 2008, Rose Tremain won the Orange Prize for Fiction for The Road Home (2007); inspired by the large-scale economic migration that followed the expansion of the European Union in 2004, this novel tells the story of a Polish man who moves to Britain looking for work. Like Tremain, several other recent Orange Prize nominees and winners have taken diaspora as their central theme, most notably Andrea Levy, whose Small Island (2004) – which also won the Whitbread Book of the Year award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize – explores the impact of post-war migration and the birth of multiculturalism on both West Indian immigrants and the existing inhabitants of Britain.
"Diaspora," which denotes the forced or voluntary displacement of groups of people from their homeland and their dispersal across the globe, has also become an increasingly popular and important term in academia, as the emergence in 1991 of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, edited by Khachig Tölölyan, attests. Further, in the UK, the Arts and Humanities Research Council established a major "Diasporas, Migration and Identities" programme in 2005. As Diaspora Studies has developed, feminists have paid particular attention to how gender shapes both the material experience of migration and the ways in which diaspora is conceived and represented in gendered terms. For example, Avtar Brah points out that women are perceived as the embodiment of "culture" and "tradition" in both the homeland and the hostland (12), and argues that the construction of "difference" in discourses of nation is a gendered phenomenon (15). Gayatri Gopinath proposes that the very word "diaspora" is phallocentric because, although it means to scatter or disseminate, it evokes and is linked, etymologically, to "sperm" (5–6). Further, she observes that "all too often diasporas are narrativized through the bonds of relationality between men" (5).4 Resisting this androcentricism and highlighting the importance of women and gender to Diaspora Studies, in 2008 Feminist Review published a volume entitled "Gendering Diaspora" and Canadian Literature devoted a Special Issue to "Diasporic Women's Writing."5 Recent books, such as Brinda Mehta's Notions of Identity, Diaspora and Gender in Caribbean Women's Writing (2009), Amy Tak-yee Lai's Chinese Women Writers in Diaspora (2007), Persis M. Karim's Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (2006), and Yasmin Hussain's Writing Diaspora: South Asian Women, Culture and Ethnicity (2005), confirm the international interest in this subject.
Despite feminist interventions in the field, women's voices often remain unheard and female experience still tends to be un(der)represented. This Special Issue seeks to address that problem by bringing into focus a range of neglected and newly emergent contemporary women writers who are discussed alongside more established figures. While there is no attempt to be comprehensive in terms of coverage, the essays examine the representation of a range of diasporas and together emphasise the diversity of diasporic experience. Implicitly acknowledging the importance of "transversal politics" (Yuval-Davis 125), a mode of feminism that rejects the essentialising tendencies of identity politics and acknowledges the importance of difference without falling into relativism, the essays eschew universal definitions and a monolithic approach to analysis whilst focusing on the meanings of diaspora in specific places and periods. Susan Stanford Friedman discusses fiction by the Pakistani writer Jamila Hashmi, Shauna Singh Baldwin (who was born in Canada, grew up in India, moved back to Canada and then to the United States), the Nigerian-born Buchi Emecheta (who moved from Lagos to London at 16), Edwidge Danticat (who moved from Haiti to the United States as a teenager), and the Egyptian-born Leila Aboulela, who grew up in Sudan before moving to Scotland and later moved from Aberdeen to Abu Dhabi. Sneja Gunew examines the work of three writers who share a South Asian heritage: Anita Rau Badami and Shani Mootoo (the former born in India, the latter born in Ireland and raised in Trinidad, both now residing in Canada), and Yasmine Gooneratne (born in Sri Lanka and based in Australia). Sandra R. G. Almeida focuses on the Japanese Canadian writer Hiromo Goto, and Susheila Nasta explores the work of the Antiguan-born American author Jamaica Kincaid. These authors represent diasporas generated by different factors – historical trauma, colonialism and its legacies, globalisation – and are attentive to generational difference. Further, their work highlights the ways in which gender combines with race, class, sexuality, economic power and cultural capital in determining diasporic subjectivity. The essays are complemented by Claire Chambers's interview with Leila Aboulela, a writer whose fiction persistently explores the themes of geographical and cultural displacement from a Muslim perspective.
Friedman situates her discussion of diasporic women's writing in the context of a post-9/11 escalation in the rhetoric of "culture clash" and debates about the "new migration," a defining feature of globalisation in the post-war era. Disputing a binary model of the world that distinguishes "the West" from "the Rest," and questioning both the centrality and homogeneity of "the West" in perceptions of diaspora, her essay examines the representation of migrations that occur outside the West and the diversity of diasporic experience within it. Finally, arguing that the miscegenation generated by migration is more likely to result in interconnection than conflict, she highlights the mutually transformative effects of diaspora on migrants and their new homelands. Moreover, Friedman contends that it is writing by women that takes gender as its focus that most clearly highlights the complexities of diaspora and reveals the omissions and hidden assumptions in debates about the "new migration."
Gunew also emphasises the importance of acknowledging difference and diversity. Beginning with an overview of diaspora criticism, her essay stresses the need for a non-unitary approach to the analysis of writers who occupy and represent disparate positions within a particular diasporic group. Stressing the temporal and spatial specificities that animate the work of three South Asian writers, Gunew questions the value of models that elide the complex permutations of varying and multiple migrations. She explores the significance of difference between and within diasporas (in terms of ethnicity, religion, language, generation, and sexuality, for example), highlighting the heterogeneity that lies behind the homogenising labels "South Asian" and "women."
Almeida's essay addresses Hiromi Goto's exploration of the ways in which dislocated subjects negotiate the feelings of alienation and monstrosity that accompany the status of alien, stranger or foreigner. Drawing on Kristeva's concept of abjection, Butler's theorization of the social norms that determine the (il)legitimacy and (un)intelligibility of bodies, and Derrida's ethics of hospitality, she argues that Goto employs pregnancy as a metaphor for the diasporic state of Japanese Canadians. She proposes that the ethnic body, like the pregnant body, is both highly visible and vulnerable, and arouses simultaneous feelings of fascination and repulsion. However, Almeida also proposes that it is the experience of pregnancy that enables Goto's protagonists to finally accept as positive and productive their own otherness and a diasporic subjectivity defined by doubleness.
Nasta's essay on Jamaica Kincaid points up the intersection of diaspora and related fields through her analysis of post-colonial life writing. Situating Kincaid's fictional self-portraits in the context of recent theories of autobiography, Nasta demonstrates how she subverts the conventions of the genre by blurring the boundaries between fiction and memoir, subject and object, self and other. This essay illustrates that by engaging in a continual process of self-invention, Kincaid subverts Western notions of a unitary subject and the singularity of truth. Arguing that her sensibility as a writer is shaped by the visual awareness she developed as a student of photography, Nasta proposes that Kincaid's desire to work outside the frame of Western genres coincides with an impulse to reframe her colonial past in the context of a diasporic present. The use of photographs in Kincaid's work exposes or brings into focus what has been erased by colonial history – what Nasta (drawing on Teresa de Lauretis) calls "the space not visible" within "the frame" – and creates what she terms (borrowing from Susan Sontag) "a new visual code" or "ethics of seeing."
These essays explore the characteristic themes of diaspora – home and exile, loss and longing, un/belonging, in/authenticity, im/purity, hybridity – but do so from a woman-centered perspective that privileges female experience. They examine the social, political, and cultural effects of migration, addressing the question of how women have reshaped prevailing conceptions of diaspora as well as how diaspora has shaped contemporary women's writing. Domesticity, family and the body emerge as central preoccupations that often converge, as Almeida and Friedman note, in the symbolic significance of food. Further, the senses – taste (Almeida), touch (Friedman), smell (Gunew), and sight (Nasta) – play a key role in the ways in which women negotiate their diasporic state. The essays also affirm Kim Snowden's assertion that the gendered body is at the centre of women's representations of diaspora (199). Almeida focuses on pregnancy while Friedman parallels the traversal of national borders with the violation of the boundaries of women's bodies in acts of sexual violence. However, humour (Gunew focuses on satire, Almeida on irony) signals a movement away from the dominant view of the diasporic subject as plaintive or tragic and, despite an awareness of the oppressiveness of patriarchy and the horrors of racism, the essays resist the image of women as victims by emphasising female agency.
Overall, these essays are defined by an interest in the possibility of empowerment engendered by diaspora. As Gunew notes, the instabilities that nations designate "troubling," immigrants often find "enabling" ("Serial" 7). Moreover, the essays are particularly concerned with the subversive potential of representations of diasporic women. They argue that female subjects have the power to disturb or subvert masculinist conceptions of diaspora and dominant ideologies of home and nation as well as the hegemony of a patriarchal, Western literary tradition and history. In other words, the essays in this Special Issue examine the ways in which women unsettled by migration become unsettling women.
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1 For further information about CWWN and to join the network go to www.cwwn.org.uk
For the postgraduate branch of the network, go to www.pgcwwn.org 
2 The interview that I conducted with Linda Grant at the conference was published in special issue of Wasafiri on "Jewish/Postcolonial Diasporas," edited by Bryan Cheyette.
3 The joint winners were Ruksana Majid (University of Sheffield, UK) for her paper "Discourse(s) of the Veil: Gender, Identity and the Islamic Veil in Leila Aboulela's Minaret" and Frances White (Kingston University, UK) for "‘The world is just a transit camp’: Diaspora in the Fiction of Iris Murdoch."
4 Nira Yuval-Davis (1997), Floya Anthias (2000), Anne-Marie Fortier (2000), and Sara Ahmed (2003) have also made significant contributions to debates about migration from a feminist perspective. Like Gopinath, Fortier examines the intersection of the ideologies of gender and sexuality, bringing queer diasporas into view.
5 See Feminist Review 90 (2008), guest edited by Tina Campt and Deborah A. Thomas, and Canadian Literature 196 (Spring 2008), guest edited by Sneja Gunew. While the former focuses on the African diaspora from an interdisciplinary perspective and the latter focuses on writers based in Canada, both challenge hegemony by focusing on "individuals and communities situated very differently within a given diasporic formation" (Campt and Thomas 1).
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Ahmed Sara, Castaneda Claudia, Fortier Anne-Marie, Sheller Mimi, eds. Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration (2003) Oxford: Berg.
Anthias Floya, Lazaridis Gabriella, eds. Gender and Migration in Southern Europe: Women on the Move (2000) Oxford: Berg.
Brah Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (1996) London: Routledge.
Campt Tina, Thomas Deborah A. Gendering Diaspora: Transnational Feminism, Diaspora and its Hegemonies. Feminist Review (2008) 90:1–8.[CrossRef]
Fortier Anne-Marie. Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space, Identity (2000) Oxford: Berg.
Gopinath Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (2005) Durham and London: Duke UP.
Gunew Sneja. Serial Accommodations: Diasporic Women's Writing. Canadian Literature (2008) 196(Spring):6–15.
Hussain Yasmin. Writing Diaspora: South Asian Women, Culture and Ethnicity (2005) Aldershot: Ashgate.
Karim Persis M. ed. Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (2006) Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P.
Lai Amy Tak-yee. Chinese Women Writers in Diaspora (2007) Cambridge: Scholars Press.
Mehta Brinda. Notions of Identity, Diaspora and Gender in Caribbean Women's Writing (2009) London: Palgrave.
Parker Emma. An Interview with Linda Grant. Wasafiri (2009) 24.1(Spring):27–32.
Snowden Kim. Gendered Multiplicities: Women Write Diaspora. Canadian Literature (2008) 196(Spring):198–201.
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