ABSTRACT
This essay explores the interface of archive, affect, and the everyday in the works of contemporary South Asian queer diasporic visual artists Allan deSouza and Chitra Ganesh. In their work, as I hope to show, queer diasporic affect becomes a portal through which history, memory, and the process of archiving itself are reworked, in order both to critique the ongoing legacies of slavery, colonialism, and contemporary forms of racialization, and to imagine alternative forms of affiliation and collectivity. The materiality of the everyday-the anti-monumental, the small, the inconsequential-is closely linked to this project of excavating the past: it is precisely through what Kathleen Stewart terms “ordinary affects” that saturate the everyday that this grappling with the past occurs (2007). My point of entry into a discussion of the work of deSouza and Ganesh is Saidiya Hartman’s much-praised memoir, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007). Hartman’s text traces her journey along a slave route in Ghana and is a powerful reckoning with slavery’s aftermath, its wiping out of individual and collective histories and genealogies. Situating Hartman’s memoir as an important intertext to the work of deSouza and Ganesh, as I do here, runs the risk of flattening out the distinctions between the kinds of diasporic roots and routes traveled by differently racialized populations. Hartman is an African American literary scholar and a descendent of slaves whose own familial genealogy fades into obscurity after three generations; her relation to Ghana and to the postcolonial Africans from all parts of the continent that she encounters there is marked with an irreducible sense of her own strangeness and estrangement. DeSouza, on the other hand, grew up in postcolonial Kenya, a descendent of Goan Indian immigrants who arrived in British-ruled East Africa in the 1930s to work on the railroads that were initially built by Indian indentured laborers in the late nineteenth century. He migrated with his family to London, then as an adult moved again to Los Angeles and San Francisco. His parents settled in Portugal, “one step closer to their colonial histories” (deSouza, 2008a). DeSouza comments on the spatial and temporal dislocations
engendered by these various movements as he recalls being viciously beaten in a racist attack in London: “perhaps I was too often in the wrong place, but if your family history and childhood experience are routed through three different colonies and their colonial powers-Goa under the Portuguese, India under the British, and Kenya, again Britishthen being in the wrong place and at the wrong time too easily becomes habitual.” Chitra Ganesh’s diasporic trajectory appears at first glance to be more straightforward than that of deSouza: born and bred in Brooklyn, NY, Ganesh is the daughter of South Indian immigrants from Calcutta who settled in New York in the early 1970s. Her parents were already cosmopolitan, migrant subjects before entering the US, in the sense that they belonged to the community of Tamil Brahmins that had become a settled presence in Calcutta since the 1920s; their background thus speaks to the displacements and movements that happen within the nation itself and prior to the experience of transnational migration. While Ganesh’s parents were part of the influx of mainly professional South Asians that entered into the US as a result of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, they did not follow the typical trajectory of South Asian middle class migrants. Her mother was a school teacher, her father a bank clerk, while their circle of acquaintances were other middle and working class South Asians who labored as mechanics, shop owners, and housewives. Significantly, they chose to remain in the multiracial urban environment of Brooklyn rather than escaping to the suburbs “as part of [the narrative of] desi immigrant upward social mobility,” as Ganesh puts it (Ganesh 2009).
