M.G. Vassanji’s A Place Within: Thinking through India, Transnationally

In their groundbreaking collection, Minor Transnationalism, Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih advocate a new approach to transnationalism, which, by shifting the ground of analysis to “transversal” movements of culture, departs from existing theoretical frameworks and allows for the emergence of “minor-to-minor networks” (8) that have the potential to circumvent the major altogether. Lionnet’s and Shih’s understanding of transnationalism not in terms of vertical relations between center and margin, but in terms of cultural transversalism, is particularly apt in the context of MG Vassanji’s writings, notably because his books often complicate those hackneyed notions of hybridity constructing Western locales as the privileged sites of plurality. In this paper, my contention is that Lionnet’s and Shih’s concept of ‘minor transnationalism’ also proves useful to deconstruct the discourse of ‘dominant’ Western-based diasporas that style themselves as “the legitimate archive with which to explore diasporic subjectivities” (Vijay Mishra, 3) — such as the hyper-visible ‘new’ Indian diaspora of global capital.

Taking its cue from Lionnet’s and Shih’s concept of minor transnationalism, this paper looks at A Place Within (2008), the memoir of Vassanji’s travels across the land of his ancestors over two decades, with a view to showing how the author’s positionality as a ‘minor’ transnational (i.e. as a Canadian writer of Indian descent born on East-African soil) gives a new twist to the now-classic ‘return to the Indian homeland’ narrative — a staple, indeed, of the enormously popular Indian diasporic literature. At stake is the contention that Vassanji’s own brand of ‘minor transnationalism’ allows for a unique descent into the messiness of India, the ‘slippery’ nature of its past — well beyond diaspora’s dubious politics of retrieval and its investment in purist readings of the Indian homeland