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).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
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).
Works Cited
Badruddoja, Roksana. 2008. Queer Spaces, Places, and Gender: The Tropologies of Rupa and Ronica. Feminist Formations 20 (2): 156–188.
Basu, Subho, and Sikata Banerjee. 2006. The Quest for Manhood: Masculine Hinduism and Nation in Bengal. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 26 (3): 476–490.
Bose, Brinda. 2008. Modernity, Globality, Sexuality, and the City A Reading of Indian Cinema. The Global South 2 (1): 35–58.
Brod, Harry. 2002. Studying Masculinities as Superordinate Studies. In Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory. New Directions, ed. Judith Gardiner, 160–175. New York: Columbia University Press.
Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble. Feminsim and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Chakravartty, Paula. 2000. The Emigration of High-Skilled Indian Workers to the United States: Flexible Citizenship and India’s Information Economy. Working Paper 19: 1–37, San Diego: The Center for Comparative Immigration Studies CCIS University of California.
Desai, Jigna. 2004. Beyond Bollywood. The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. New York and London: Routledge.
Ebert, Roger. 2007. The Namesake. Film Review. http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-namesake.
Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar. 2001. On Alternative Modernities. In Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, 1–23. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Gilroy, Paul. 2004. After Empire. Oxford: Routledge.
Hall, Stuart. 1990. Cultural Identity and Diaspora. In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford, 222–237. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Holden, Stephen. 2007. Film Review: Modernity and Tradition at a Cultural Crossroads. The Namesake. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/movies/09name.html.
Internet Movie Data Base. 2006. The Namesake. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433416/.
Kalra, Virinder S. 2009. Between Emasculation and Hypermasculinity: Theorizing British South Asian Masculinities. South Asian Popular Culture 7 (2): 113–125.
Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lahiri, Jumpa. 2004. A Conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri. In A Reader’s Guide: The Namesake. Jumpa Lahiri. Houghton Mifflin Company. http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/readers_guides/pdfs/lahiri_namesake.pdf.
Lewis, Reina. 1996. Gendering Orientalism: Race, Feminity and Representation. London and New York: Routledge.
MacKinnon, Kenneth. 2004. The Family in Hollywood Melodrama: Actual or Ideal? Journal of Gender Studies 13 (1): 29–36.
Mani, Bakirathi, and Latha Varadarajan. 2005. ‘The Largest Gathering of the Global Indian Family’: Neoliberalism, Nationalism, and Diaspora at Pravasi Bharatiya Diva. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 14 (1): 45–74.
McArthur, Colin. 1982. Scotch Reels. London: British Film Institute.
Mosse, George L. 1996. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nair, Mira, dir. 2007. The Namesake. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.
Rajan, Gita. 2006. Constructing-Contesting Masculinities: Trends in South Asian Cinema. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31 (4): 1099–1124.
Rotten Tomatoes. 2006. The Namesake. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/namesake/.
Shukla, Pankaj. 2006. Mira Nair’s Name at Stake. http://www.smashits.com/mira-nair-s-name-at-stake/movie-review-6104.html.
Silverman, Kaja. 1988. The Acoustic Mirror. The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Theories of Representation and Difference. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Warnke, Georgia. 2008. After Identity: Rethinking Race, Sex and Gender. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62133-3_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-62132-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-62133-3
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)