East African Asian Writing and the Emergence of a Diasporic Aesthetic

Abstract

This article traces the emergence of East African Asian writings and their struggle with questions of national belonging and diaspora. It argues that although this emergence was part and parcel of the literary developments that were taking place in the East Africa region in the 1960s, these writings would later distinguish themselves as texts that are not only framed by the ambivalent and diasporic histories of Indians in imperial and postcolonial East Africa but also as writings that consciously construct ambivalent diasporic subjectivities as the basis of new forms of East African Indian identities. I argue that this ambivalence reveals itself in the way these texts disavow dominant, nationalistic, even binary accounts of colonial relationships and create, instead, narratives that skirt the borderlines of both colonial and nationalist discourses.