Diasporic Memories and National Histories in East African Asian Writing

This article analyzes texts by East African Asian writers in order to tease out ambiguities and disjunctions that problematize the relationship between nation and diaspora. First, I briefly mention the counternationalistic discourses towards which this literature seems to gesture and then read texts by Moyez Vassanji and Jameela Siddiqi to show how their works gesture toward the diasporic imaginary while persistently returning to the site of the nation to enact the difference of the diasporic subject. I argue that these works disavow and at the same time re-inscribe national narratives as if to suggest the continuing significance of the nation as a site of enacting the politics of identity. I discuss how these writers, for example, deal with the fact that the Asian attempt to relate to the national memory in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda is often circumscribed by the perception that they do not share, in equal measure at least, the experience of colonial oppression and the history of decolonization, twin events that provide defining moments in the construction of nationhood in these countries. I conclude that the very act of writing the Asian presence in East Africa is itself an attempt to uncover connections to histories of resistance that get suppressed when the stereotype of Asians as collaborators of colonialism is amplified within the official discourse of nation building.