Here's a cutting edge article on how diasporic identity intersects with negative theology--something that has interested me for some time because it is, in part, my own experience. You will find here cultural studies intersecting with postcolonial theory, literary criticism, philosophy, and mysticism.

http://www.blackwell-synergy.c....00007.x?cookieSet=1

While I'm at it, I'll also post my Master's proposal for those interested in getting a bit of background information on disapora and some of the questions that it's raising in all sorts of fields.

My MES Studies focus on two closely related phenomena: (1) How diasporic identities are formed/constructed; and (2) The ways in which diasporic identities can be represented particularily through creative writing. In a review of Writing Outside the Nation, Labidi writes: [i]n an effort to confront the ennui of losing the Heimat (homeland), these narratives experiment with new modes of articulating "their linguistic and cultural heritage through acts of personal and collective memory" (Labidi, 2001: p.189). Thus these texts allow a student informed by postcolonial theory to study shifting imaginary environments/geographies and cultural identities and how these shifts register in narrative, for example, in the �spontaneous mixing of language codes, and adoption of cross-lingual idioms to articulate (their) semiotic experiences of loss based on unique personal or families' autobiographies (Labidi, 2001: p.189).� Postcolonial theory can also be used to study Western born second generation diasporic writers. This plan of study will explore the work of second generation diasporic writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, investigating how these texts differ from those of first generation diasporic writers.

Immigrants negotiate their identity through a dialogic process with the host culture and the culture(s) that they have left (Bhatia, 2002: p.55). The negotiation of cultural identities often creates ontological instability and difficulties in the construction of an authentic sense of self in first and second generation immigrants. This point of instability is interesting for a writer because of the possibilities of subverting more traditional ways of storytelling by creating multiple narrative threads, narrative points of view, narrative �detours�as a narratological methodology which reflects the position of people who live between two (or more) cultural identities. For creative artists and writers of the diaspora, this position often results in the creation of �hybrid� texts and discourses which employ complex strategies to reenact the cultural and ideological split between identities. These texts creatively engage and mediate through this split, often exploring the cultural area between simplistic binary constructions such as �the colonizer� and �the colonized,� while also putting into question one-dimensional readings of history.

Bhabha calls this tension filled hybrid area a �third space� and writes: �The intervention of the Third Space of enunciation, which makes the structure of meaning and reference an ambivalent process, destroys this mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed as integrated, open, expanding code. Such an intervention quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People (Bhabha, 1994: p. 218)." Culture and �hybrid discourses� are dynamic, in flux, pivoting on a destabilized (and continually contested) past, situating themselves in what Rath calls a �third culture�, �third history,� ultimately a third discourse. What are the modern forms of this �third discourse�? (Rath, 2000). What semiotics do these �third discourses� employ? How do these texts differ from postmodern texts? More importantly, perhaps: how can diasporic identities at least partially be reconstructed around a sense of authenticity, a narrative and a history unique to their identities rather than grasping at an �originary past,� or partially annuling the past?

Components of the Area of Concentration

1) Postcolonial Theory and Diasporic Identities

In the case of South Asian children of post-1965 immigrants, there is often �a second migration in young adulthood, a geographic and psychological return to the ancestral country [which]�symbolically completes the cycle of migration begun by the first generation, reciprocating the material and professional contributions of Indian immigrants to the ancestral country and fostering an ongoing exchange within the Indian diaspora (Maira, 1995. p 34).� One of my particular interests in exploring postcolonial theory is to see how diasporic identities are recontextualized by second generation North American or European born writers of the diasporas.

I will be drawing upon two main literatures (1) Postcolonial theory; and (2) Creative writing. The key theorists that will include (1) Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Homi Bhabha, Roger Bromley, Deleuze and Guattari, Frantz Fanon, Freud, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, R. Radhakrishnan and Slavoj Zizek. I will be looking at the intersection of postcolonial theory with psychoanalysis, sociology, literary theory, narratology and the politics of identity formation.

I will be exploring the similarities between postmodern and postcolonial literature and �their resistance to the monologic meta-narratives of modernism and realism (in the arts), and orientalism (in cultural anthropology), colonialism and racism (in geopolitical history), fundamentalism and nativism (in terms of collective identity) and patriarchy (in gender relations); their celebration of dialogic marginality and intertexuality; their recuperation of the mixed modes of hybridity, parody, fantasy and allegory; their convergence and collision over poststructuralist themes; and their self-definition through the nomadic, the diasporic, and the exile (Choon and Patk, 2000).� I will also be exploring the ways in which postcolonial narrativity and postmodern narrativity diverge; the ways in which postcolonialism has, perhaps, come around �full circle� (particularily in the second generation) and at least �partially resolved the trauma of postmodernism� (Rath 2000).

Learning Objective 1:

To gain a general understanding of postcolonial theory in order to better understand the diasporic �condition.�


2) Creative Writing

The key diasporic writers that will inform (2) will include: Nirad C Chaudhuri, Ien Eng, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez, Toni Morrison, Bharati Mukherjee, Michael Ondaatje, Ben Okri, Salmon Rushdie, Derek Walcott, Shyam Selvaduram, Bapsi Sidhwa, M.G Vassanji, and Arthur Yap among others. This area of study will provide me with the space to experiment with different forms of writing�writing which will have some basis in postcolonial theory. I will be particularly interested in a) seeing how narrative mediates across cultural selves. How can this movement across cultural selves be represented in form, style, dialogue, dialect and genre? If, as Bhabha asserts, dual or multiple cultural identities are incommensurable, how can the negotiation of identities be represented in narratological methodology? Should this form differ from the forms employed by postmodernism?

Learning Objective 2:

To familiarize myself with first generation and second generation diasporic writers; to write text(s) that are informed by current theories on diasporic identity formation and postcolonial theory.