Reading Migration and Culture: The World of East African Indian Literature by Dan Ojwang (review)

Dan Ojwang’s book is the most comprehensive monograph available to date on the literary culture of East African Indians, who, as Ojwang notes, have historically been identified as Asians, Asian Africans, Afrindians, and Asian East Africans, among other terms. While critics have written on one or more of the authors that Ojwang studies, no one has engaged with their themes in such a comparative way. The book includes discussions of familiar writers, such as Kuldip Sondhi, Peter Nazareth, M. G. Vassanji, and Bahadur Tejani, but it also addresses newer voices, such as Jameela Siddiqi, Shailja Patel, and Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla. In doing so, Ojwang stretches our imagination beyond the now obligatory discussions of migration and diaspora to subjects such as queer identity, which, alas, continues to be held by many in the Asian community as taboo. Indeed, one could go so far as to argue that while migration is the condition of possibility of many of the narratives that Ojwang analyzes, it is the policing of domesticity and particularly sexuality (both heterosexual and homosexual; both endogamous and exogamous) that undergird their sociopolitical dynamics.

Throughout his very lucid (and I might add classroom-teachable) close readings, Ojwang makes a number of claims that strike the reader’s attention. He argues, for instance, that it is productive to read Asian texts in the context of earlier literature in African languages in which black African men came to understand their position in the colonial world “through tropes of masculine loss” (4). How might this frame the representation of black masculinity in Asian literary texts? Or again, he reminds us of a shift in attitudes toward displacement from an earlier nationalist effort to restore displaced cultures—to make them whole again—to later postmodern and post-national readings of displacement as a space of possibility and privilege. Related to this shift, Ojwang tracks as well a corollary shift from the literature of commitment (represented by earlier writers such as Tejani) to the literature of doubt (as represented by writers such as Vassanji). He is particularly attentive not only to the historical moment in which each literary text was produced, but also to the specific spatial context of its emergence. Here the discussion of the “double diaspora” of East African Asians who migrated to the West and their engagement with multiculturalism and the politics of recognition in their new host societies plays a significant role in the shaping of the literary tradition.

The themes taken up in the chapters vary from the ideologies of immigration, to representations of Africa in the Indian imagination, to the policing of sexuality, to the possibility of writing ethnic histories, to food as a site of “writing” memory and encoding histories of resistance, accommodation, and cultural exchange (a provocative but ultimately persuasive argument). The structure of the book allows for a return to some of the same texts from chapter to chapter as the theme demands. This choice of structure is refreshing since it allows for a real dialogue between the texts and gives the sense of a literary tradition that has been in the making. Furthermore, the fact that Ojwang often insists on reading the texts by Asians in the context of some of the debates that have taken place both in African literary circles at large, as well as in postcolonial theory in general, means that they don’t end up being presented as isolated or exceptional despite their shared histories and concerns.

Having long been an admirer of Ojwang’s work (even when disagreeing with a particular reading of his of a text here or there), I am delighted that we finally have an authoritative and compelling reading of East African Indian literature.