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The 1990s was the decade of postcolonial studies. Once upon a time, being “poco” was a well-kept secret. “It took one to know one, as it were,” claims the diva of the field: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (“Transnationality” 70). Now it seems everyone is out of the closet. Even as the market in postcolonial literatures multiplies and burgeons to feed what Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva call the “consumable Other,” (2) and Sneja Gunew the “apolitical ethnic […] celebrat[ion of] multicultural […] costumes, cooking and concerts” (“Postcolonialism” 24), there has been an increasing awareness on the part of the academy to unpack these terms. While interrogations of colonial discourse and its creation of Others have been foundational to postcolonial studies, there is a new kind of orientalising gaze that operates on the will-toknow the Other: through the market economy of first world consumption masquerading as globalisation. Vilashini Cooppan traces this phenomenon to a hegemonic Americanised version of postcolonial studies which, on the one hand, “produces the post-colonial reader and the syllabi of post-colonial undergraduate courses that rely on such readers,” (2, emphasis added), and on the other, “distances itself from the other parts of the world to which this field of inquiry has traveled, or less euphemistically, been exported” (10). In such a version, so-called third world texts make the transition from being national allegories, in the Jamesonian sense, to being representative of the migrant, the marginal, and the minority. The Other, in pluralistic democracies, becomes fetishised and multiply produced as an object of desire, while at the same time being socially articulated/discriminated against through the Notes are on page 139. 127 M R I D U L A N A T H C H A K R A B O R T Y Nostalgic Narratives and the Otherness Industry politics of difference. My paper is an attempt to take stock of the “booming Otherness industry” (Bahri and Vasudeva 12) and address this issue of representation and difference that lies at the heart of contemporary postcolonial studies. I take the case of Anita Rau Badami, who made her mark on the Canadian literary scene with Tamarind Mem in 1996 and followed it up in 2000 with her second novel, The Hero’s Walk. I am not really interested in exploring the textual nuances of what I call “nostalgic narratives ” but in understanding why and how these texts may be read and taught as postcolonial literature. These nostalgic narratives, for me, are the diasporic expressions of Third World intellectuals trying to come to terms with life in Anglo-North America, often through the retelling of a particularised socio-cultural collectivity, creating thereby not only a memory of home, but a home in memory.1 Memory becomes the gunny sack in which the intellectual and emotional baggage of the refugee, the immigrant, and the asylum seeker crosses the waters. Otherwise, their new world has “no room for the world that live[s] in their imagination” (Ghosh 76). In Rosemary Marangoly George’s formulation, “all fiction is homesickness” and “all homesickness is fiction” (1, 199). Being alienated and excluded and feeling out of place in their new country of adoption, while at the same time retaining a sense of engrossment and familiarity with it, the elite professionals and intellectuals from excolonies forge what comes to constitute an “emergent” body of postcolonial literature. Writings by subjects who are constituted as the racialised and minoritised Others of the dominant majority within the context of liberal pluralist , multiculturalist white settler nations have the burden placed upon them of being representative of their mythical and cultural originary. This self-representation takes the form, often, of what Toni Morrison calls “literary archaeology” (302), whereby absent or lost narratives are (re)constructed from memory as a way of giving legitimate and necessary voice to the present of cultures historically damaged by colonisation . In Morrison’s case, such retrievals work to uncover the crucial lapses and elisions of received history and lay bare the stories of an enslaved and oppressed people. For diasporic communities from erstwhile colonised nations, these representations also serve the dual function of keeping the myth of the Return (to the country of origin) alive while serving up the vignettes of that culture in celebratory doses for communal nostalgic consumption. Within the dominant culture, however, these representations by “novelists of the nation as local 128 M R I D U L A N A T H C H A K R A B...

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