Gendered Spatial Politics and the Limits of Representation in M.G. Vassanji's Fiction

Author(s)	Dr. Bompi Riba
Country	India
Abstract	Home is rarely the neutral shelter it claims to be. In M. G. Vassanji's fiction it is arguably least neutral where women are concerned. This paper attempts to read The Gunny Sack (1989), No New Land (1991), The Book of Secrets (1994), The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (2003), The Assassin's Song (2007), and The Magic of Saida (2012) through feminist cultural geography — particularly Doreen Massey's sense of space as social relations and Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling's account of home as at once material, imagined, and felt. The paper also discusses how how the gendered spatial politics begins in the community’s founding Sufi myth and they also echo through the domestic architecture, food practices, and the inherited division between home and the outside world. It will also discuss how the African women in these novels are eroticised and largely silenced and are made to stand in for the land itself. Read against Lisa Lau's notion of “re-orientalism,” this suggests that Vassanji, in the act of carving out a distinct South Asian East African identity, ends up repeating some of the same exoticising gestures that colonial discourse once used on the Orient.
Keywords	Diaspora, East African Indian Fiction, Feminist Geography, Gendered Space, Home, M. G. Vassanji
Field	Arts
Published In	Volume 6, Issue 1, January-February 2024
Published On	2024-02-10

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