ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates how notions of race, class, and home are redefi ned within the South Asian gendered diaspora through strategies of subversive identity formation. I will be making my argument through an analysis of Sarah Gavron’s 2007 fi lm Brick Lane (based on Monica Ali’s novel by the same name), and Gurinder Chadha’s 1993 fi lm Bhaji on the Beach. The two cultural texts are enunciated from feminine points of view and use the trope of women’s cross-border/cultural/spatial/temporal movement as a key element in the construction of diasporic gendered subjectivity. They challenge hegemonic (Western as well as South Asian) patriarchal constructions of the traditional South Asian femininity that become the narratives’ primary site of contestation. Both of them represent multiple heterogeneous “migratory subjectivities” rather than fi t the mold of a “singular and homogenised version of diasporic experience” (Desai, 2003: 135). In my discussions, I will be drawing on the works of Mohanty (1991), Hall (2003), Desai (2003), Huggan (2006), Proctor (2000), Abdel-Malek (1981), Khan (2005), and Hussain (2005).
