Abstract
This chapter examines the critical nexus that exists between suffering, aesthetics, and the social formations of diaspora as articulated in contemporary Indo-Caribbean and Sikh popular art. While we retain a commitment to our ethnographic examples in the areas of South Asian art, music, and performance throughout the text, we have arranged our argument around two thematic fields: (1) the framing of the relationship between art and suffering (including discourses on trauma) in the contemporary theory of art and aesthetics and (2) the conceptualization of diaspora as an aesthetic force with the capacity to produce particular subjectivities. Despite the widely recognized historic specificities and the fluctuating cultural makeup of diverse diaspora formations, scholarly research has for a considerable time prioritized the various cultural, political, and social forces that solidify social imaginations of places of origin (the ancestral home) and the collective destinies binding a people to these places. Acknowledging the possible range of diasporic junctures and the distinct forms of collective social imagination resulting from them, typologies of diaspora (e.g., Cohen 2008) have nonetheless often prioritized the significance of (post)traumatic loss and suffering as one of the key foci for diasporic memories.1
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© 2014 Ratiba Hadj-Moussa and Michael Nijhawan
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Nijhawan, M., Schultz, A.C. (2014). The Diasporic Rasa of Suffering: Notes on the Aesthetics of Image and Sound in Indo-Caribbean and Sikh Popular Art. In: Hadj-Moussa, R., Nijhawan, M. (eds) Suffering, Art, and Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426086_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137426086_8
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