This chapter examines the construction of imagined homelands in a post-national world with a particular focus on the transnational, South Asian, brown women who are expected to display their dis/interested love and sacrifice. Drawing upon Gloria Anzaldúa's theory of Nueva Conciencia Mestiza and the notion of borderland, this chapter studies Taslima Nasreen's French Lover (2002) and Monica Ali's Brick Lane (2004) to address the following questions: How do the female protagonists of the novels—that is, Nilanjana and Nazneen, respectively—succeed to negotiate their position as in-betweeners between imagined homelands? How different are the male and the female characters' perceptions of their home/land? How do the women imagine their homeland when they are asked whether they want to go back or what is their homeland like? Both novels propose a new discourse of home/land in response to such (rhetorical) inquiries. It is argued that the two case studies demarcate the idea of border(home)land as a notion that is neither geographically nor imaginarily fixed.
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(You) say my name is ambivalence? Think of me as Shiva, a many-armed and legged body. A sort of spider woman hanging by one thin strand of web. Who, me, confused? Ambivalent? Not so. Only your labels split me. (Anzaldúa, 2009, p. 2)
Sara Ahmed defines postcolonialism as a complex study of rethinking how colonialism operated in different times that permeates all aspects of social life in both colonized and colonizing nations (Ahmed, 2000, p. 10). Ahmed points out that postcolonialism is about the complexity of the relationship between past and present, between the histories of European colonization and contemporary forms of globalization, and between the self and the other, and that is, the relationship between the two, not simply the binary division of past/present and self/other (p. 11).
In this regard, hybridity, mestizaje, and space in-between allow us to understand the complexity that lies beyond the binary division from the West/East, self/other to the interstitial zone of the in-between spaces. The in-between spaces in different forms such as third space, borderland, and hybridity become a topic of discussion in postcolonial studies heading towards transnational studies. As Homi K. Bhabha states, “the very concepts of homogenous national cultures, the consensual or contiguous transmission of historical traditions, or “organic” ethnic communities ⸻ as the grounds of cultural comparativism ⸻ are in a profound process of redefinition” (Bhabha, 1994, p. 5).
In this respect, the last decades of the twentieth century became a moment where in-depth transformations of economic production began to alter traditional social and symbolic structures at both global and local levels. In the West, manufacturing towards service and information-based structure entailed a global redistribution of labor. Here, the rest of the world (especially developing countries) provided most of the underpaid offshore production. Such global redistribution of labor attracted transnational movement. Besides, political, economic, and social upheaval in the recently independent countries resulted in the migration from the Third World to the First World countries. However, migration from one part of the world to the other is not a recent phenomenon but one of the colonial projects to bring labor from colonized land to the master land. The global relocation created a new kind of diasporic formations in different countries of the West in different periods. Significantly, the globalized world moved towards a “borderless” (1997) and “post-nation” (1996) world, as Miyoshi and Appadurai respectively refer to. That is how the terms nation and homeland have become a new topic to be researched under the transnational phenomenon. For instance, Avtar Brah, a transnational brown woman born in Punjab, presents the politics of diaspora by saying that she has had homes in four out of five continents: Asia, Africa, America, and Europe and has struggled with the question of home. She defines home as site of belongingness which is simultaneously about roots and routes. She also points out that the process of inclusion and exclusion is linked to the concept of home:
The concept of home is intrinsically linked with how processes of inclusion and exclusion operate and are subjectively experienced under given circumstances. It is centrally about our political and personal struggles over the social regulation of “belonging.” As Gilroy suggests, it is simultaneously about roots and routes. (Brah, 1996, p. 192)
Moreover, as Susan Friedman sees, transnationalism is the understanding of immigration that is relatively new because it reflects a shift from nation-based paradigms to “transnational models emphasizing the global space of ongoing travel and transcontinental connection” (Friedman, 2006, p. 906). Hence, transnational writing offers a way of thinking beyond national boundaries, not a mono-perspective from one linguistic, social, or cultural viewpoint, but a conceptualization that is bi- or multi-perspective. Fernandez and Sánchez Espinosa say that “transnationality allows a simultaneous multiplicity of exchanges and adaptations. It works on several levels since it contemplates the national together with what happens within the constraints of national borders and outside these” (Fernandez & Espinosa, 2019, p. 98).