Abstract
This chapter contributes to the unpacking of heterogeneous South Asian diasporic masculinities from post-9/11 Eurocentric monolithic and stereotypical representations, ranging from ‘the good non-Muslim migrant’ to the ‘the homegrown terrorist’. Paying attention to the complex game of geopolitical and economic hierarchies covered by the reductive signifier ‘South Asian’, this chapter uses Judith Butler’s idea of intersectional, ‘discursively constituted identities’ to analyze specifically the historical (post)colonial clichés around Bengali masculinities, their relevance within radical Hindu nationalism and their subversion from feminist perspectives in Mira Nair’s highly successful film adaptation of Jumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake.
Key authors, texts, case studies or examples: Mira Nair’s film The Namesake (2006).
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Notes
- 1.
These pervasive categories surface in popular culture; as an example, consider the character Raj (played by Kunal Nayyar) in the television series The Big Bang Theory: after several seasons making more or less explicit jokes about his sexual tendencies, in episode 21 of the 6th season he realizes that everyone believes he is homosexual.
- 2.
For the difference between ‘stereotype’ and ‘discursive position’ see Colin McArthur’s Scotch Reels (1982, 68).
- 3.
By the end of the film, there will be another scene on a train, this time his son Gogol being the one who travels, although the context, as will be discussed later, is completely different.
- 4.
When he asks Ashoke if he has ‘seen much of this world’, Ashoke says he’s been ‘to Delhi once and every year I visit my grandfather in Jamshedpur’. The passenger tells him, laughing, that he is not talking about ‘this world’ and he adds: ‘I mean England, America. I was in England for two years. It was like a dream: sparkling clean streets, nobody spitting on the road’ (0:02:05).
- 5.
For the implications regarding gender constructions of sequences in which a woman carries out some kind of performance inside a film and their endorsement of the subordinate role of women in classic cinematographic representations, see Kaja Silverman (1988, 56–7).
- 6.
A ‘properly’ gendered degree for a woman, in the same way that Gogol’s job as an architect perfectly suits dominant gender roles.
- 7.
Full of remorse as he was for having ‘traded’ his family for that of his white, upper-class girlfriend with whom he was spending most of his spare time.
- 8.
For a very similar case see, for instance, Deepa Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood.
- 9.
Silverman has pointed out the difference between the male and female gaze and how classic cinema ‘situates the female subject firmly on the side of spectacle, castration, and synchronization, while aligning her male counterpart with the gaze, the phallus, and what exceeds synchronization’ (Silverman 1988, 50).
- 10.
It is worth considering that, as Desai points out about diasporic individuals in Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach, ‘home is a fiction’, it is not home, but ‘nostalgia for a home that [she has] not been to in twenty years’ (Desai 2004, 139).
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Iglesias Díaz, E.G. (2017). Alternative Modernities and Othered Masculinities in Mira Nair’s The Namesake . In: Martín-Lucas, B., Ruthven, A. (eds) Narratives of Difference in Globalized Cultures. New Comparisons in World Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62133-3_11
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