ABSTRACT
Transnational movements and settlements in the diaspora raise questions of citizenship and statelessness in the host nations. These issues have political, constitutional, and legal dimensions and have been discussed critically over the decades in the field of social sciences. However, the corpus of articles and books dealing with the issues of citizenship and statelessness from literary perspectives is insufficient. Ethical and humanitarian dimensions of statelessness come forcefully in literary representations which can effectively bring out emotive issues arising out of majoritarian politics and state policies. This chapter explores the issue of transnational citizenship and statelessness as represented in two literary works – Monica Sone’s autobiographical narrative Nisei Daughter (1953) and Rita Chowdhury’s historical fiction Chinatown Days (2018). These texts are approached through the critical lens of affect theory. Sone’s work is the narrative of a second-generation Japanese American girl growing up in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. It shows how, based on mere suspicion, a majoritarian regime victimises the members of an immigrant community immediately after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. Chowdhury’s fiction similarly speaks of the plight of the members of the Chinese community in India who were also victims of suspicion during the Indo-Chinese war of 1961 and were subsequently interned. Both the texts share the theme of detention and speak of the emotional turmoil of the members of the incarcerated communities. They also foreground how ‘nationalist’ sentiments are built up through the manipulation of emotions of the mainstream communities. The analysis of the two works suggests that at particular historical moments, the issue of citizenship is employed as a political weapon to decide the question of inclusion/exclusion of certain categories of people in a nation state.
