Politics and Poetics of Indian Digital Diasporas

The Politics and Poetics of Indian Digital Diasporas explores the emancipatory potential and pitfalls of digital platforms and how well or how poorly they reflect intra-communal diversities within South Asian diasporic communities.This book brings together an international network of scholars both established and emerging to explore South Asian diasporic communities in the United States Canada Australia and the U.K. It is a comparative cross-national analysis of the intersection of digital technologies and South Asian diasporas. The book centres on three key themes: the ever-presence of digital spaces and the importance of exploring them as focal points for defining and contesting identities; an exploration of how ‘home’ is represented in and across South Asian diasporic communities; and intra-communal diversity in South Asian diasporic communities. The chapters show how digital spaces sometimes create unprecedented opportunities for diasporic communities to mobilise (multi)cultures sexuality race and queerness within South Asian diasporic communities and to move beyond ‘Desi’ and ‘Brown’ as homogenising identifiers. The contributors also demonstrate that digital spaces can be and have been used to reassert internal hegemonies far from homelands.Examining the discursive meanings of South Asian-ness – ‘Desi’ ‘Brown’ ‘South Asians’– the book foregrounds how it is defined performed and contested through digital platforms in ways that redefine the concept of diaspora in innovative non-territorialized polyphonic variegated and dialogic ways. A novel contribution to the intersection of global digital inequalities digital cultures and the South Asian diaspora this book will be of interest to a wide scholarly audience of digital media South Asian diaspora culture and ethnicity race and the politics of resistance and counter-hegemonic mobilisations.Chapters 1 and 7 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at taylorfrancis under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.