Traffic jams across the borderstravelling, dwelling, and the case of Indian Canadian fiction

Resumo

This essay intends to bring together the theoretical dimensions of borders as trope for the condition of movement, physical and/or metaphorical, across nations and cultures and the field of contemporary Canadian diasporic fiction. It could be argued that Canada as a nation has been implicitly founded on the notion of diaspora. Its official icon of the mosaic (purportedly different from the American assimilationist melting pot) is explicitly diasporic in content, since it obviously depends on modes of social and cultural bonding that maintain identifications outside the national time/space. I intend to explore the implications of the contemporary emphasis on movement and border crossing for the notions of culture, identity and home. My discussion will draw on the examples provided by Indian Canadian fiction for it seems paradigmatic of the present transformation of the national literature as well as of the validity of applying border theories to the diasporic text in Canada and elsewhere