Relationality and the Transnational Indian Family in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s “Nothing Must Spoil This Visit”

In Shauna Singh Baldwin’s “Nothing Must Spoil this Visit,” Arvind, a Toronto-based Sikh, returns to the homeland to visit his family with his new wife Janet, a white Canadian of Hungarian origin. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s critique of the general consensus within post-colonial theory that automatically conflates migration with the transgression of boundaries and the destabilisation of identity, this article discusses Baldwin’s short story with a view to showing how the Indian context proves crucial in deconstructing the intersecting forms of fetishism upon which Arvind’s and Janet’s multicultural and inter-relationship is based. In this return narrative, it is striking that the transnational tendencies of the contemporary world are definitely not an occasion for creating more border-crossings, more plurality, more confrontations and interaction. The encounter with otherness is indeed presented by Baldwin as always-already framed by broader relations of power that are far from being acknowledged as such. What is at stake in this text, I argue, is the somehow counterintuitive truth that migration might well work in favour of, not against, fixed notions of identity.