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OCR
MÁRIA PALLA becoming prominent in the 1950s and 1960s. Since then several violent, even terrorist events have taken place with the purpose of creating Khalistan, the Sikh nation-state, as a response to Indian oppression. Yet, as Cohen further argues, “contemporary demands for statehood are essentially anachronistic.””” He also adds the following: “Given that there are no ‘empty lands’ left in the world, can statehood for one people ever be achieved without perpetrating injustice to other ethnicities, thus bringing into being new victim diasporas with new grievances.”** Similar thoughts are expressed by Stuart Hall when he discusses forms of cultural identity. He asserts that “[c]ultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything, which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture, and power.”*® He unequivocally distances himself from “the old, the imperializing, the hegemonizing, form of ‘ethnicity” that privileges return to the homeland at all costs, “even if it means pushing other people into the sea.”” For Hall, cultural identity is not a fixed essence with a fixed origin firmly rooted in a homeland; it goes through transformations and evolves in new forms allthe time as people migrate and enter contact zones where they encounter other cultures. Therefore, identity is variously “constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative, and myth. Not an essence but a positioning.”*’ He argues for “a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity.”** In his view, it is especially true for diaspora identities because they exist in a fluid space across borders “constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.”*? Cohen’s and Hall’s observations illustrate the complex forces at play in a diaspora when its members negotiate their position in a multilocational, cross-border existence. INTERCONNECTED HISTORIES For her novel Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?, Anita Rau Badami selected four traumatic historical occurrences from the communal memory of the South Asian diaspora to effectively describe their lasting transnational influence on the socio-political environment as well as the private lives of the individual 23 Tbid., 119. 24 Tbid., 119 25 Stuart Hall, Cultural Identity and Diaspora, 1993, in J. E. Braziel - A. Mannur (eds.), Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 2003, 236. 26 Tbid., 244. 27 Thid., 236. 28 Ibid., 244. 2 Ibid., 244. * 128 +
