Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home

摘要

Allison Blunt describes this unusual story of McCluskieganj and other homes imagined and created by the Anglo-Indians in eight rather long chapters. Multiple voices speak out through her work. Her introductory chapter outlines the three major themes running through the book: the fact of being 'domiciled' - living and belonging in 'somebody else's home' where the perceived home is far away, and often imagined, yet constituting an essential part of the fluid identity; the homing desire of diasporic Anglo-Indians locating the spatial politics of home in a specific and highly gendered context; and how memory and nostalgia weave through each other to invoke not only spaces of home but also stereotypes of gendered identities. It also outlines her research strategies that span several years, and enormous amounts of archival and interview material. Chapter 2 considers the place of the Anglo-Indians both at home and abroad, focusing on the national and imperial discourses of Britain as fatherland and India as motherland. In Chapter 3, she describes how such discourses are reproduced and resisted on a domestic scale, and in Chapter 4, the mobilisation of such discourses in establishing the homeland of McCluskieganj. Chapters 5 and 6 examine the two migratory flows in Britain and in Australia,