Dan Ojwang
Biographic Data
| ID | 780042 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dan Ojwang |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dan |
| FAMILY NAME | Ojwang |
| SIGNATURE | OJWANG D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of the Witwatersrand |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 20 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Between nostalgia and melancholia
Commerce is at the heart of over two thousand years of exchange between Africa and Asia, linkages that have been facilitated by Indian Ocean trade routes. But what if we approached these episodes o
Settled strangers
The Pleasures and Tribulations of Migration
The sense of displacement and estrangement that assails migrants and diasporas is one of the most enduring subjects of East African Asian fiction, which presents images of wandering through strange territory, flight from undesirable homes, expulsions from spaces held dear, the scattering of communities and attempts to restore a sense of wholeness amidst the threat of alienation. The figure of an exiled Indian narrator from a Third World country w…
Romancing Decolonization
This chapter discusses the representation of decolonization in the works of Jagjit Singh and Kuldip Sondhi, and the politics underlying such representation, by examining four topical questions that have preoccupied the writers: the scapegoating of the Asian diaspora through the use of stereotype in the era of independence, the idea of the nation-as-one, the nationalist politics of “integration” and the marginalization of the diaspora by the new s…
Memory, Metafiction and Modernity
An acute consciousness of, and concern about, the past and its possible recovery in memory pervades the work of Moyez Vassanji, with his narratives “probing into the past to account for a present that is increasingly chaotic,” but also reaching out from the present to make sense of a past whose nature in narrative is under continual formation. 1 The burdens under whose weight the writing labors are the troubled milieux of colonial and post-coloni…
Conclusion
The last two decades have been characterized by a burgeoning interest in the literature of the South Asian diaspora, especially those writers who have left their countries of birth, by choice or necessity, to settle in Canada, Britain, the United States and Australia. This increased visibility for South Asian diasporic writing can be accounted for partially by the spectacular success of writers such as Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee and Michae…
Gender, Sexuality and Community
In Chapter 4, I have considered how East African Asian writings depict the ways in which patriarchal interests among the Asian immigrants manipulate gender in attempts to mark the limits of identity. I have also examined what is at stake in such attempts to wrest control of the communal and personal imaginary. This chapter revisits that discussion, but deliberates more specifically on how the various interests within the diasporic groups in the w…
Imaging Africa, Making “Asians”
Ethnicity and race have occupied a key role in the socio-political struggles that have occurred in East Africa during the colonial and post-independence periods. However, within the atmosphere of the self-consciously secular and nationalist tradition of intellectual work in post-independence East Africa, there has been a reluctance to discuss ethnicity in any sustained manner. In fact, when ethnicity is raised as a topic for discussion, more ofte…
Gastropolitics and Diasporic Self-Writing
What people eat or drink provides in East African Asian literature what may be called, following Arjun Appadurai, “a peculiarly powerful semiotic device.” 1 Not only do food and drink evoke in members of immigrant Asian communities a sense of their past in the wake of multiple migrations into, within and out of East Africa, they are also a powerful index of a sense of security and belonging, or the feeling of being cast adrift in strange new worl…
Miscegenation and Culture
In a discussion of the history of the East African Indians, Dana April Seidenberg has argued that the relative proximity of the region to the Indian sub-continent has meant that the diaspora has tended to look to the land of origins as the sole locus of its cultural heritage and inspiration. Unlike the Caribbean case where the descendants of nineteenth century indentured Indian laborers were integral to the creation of a creolized culture that al…
Indian Ocean Travel and Belonging in Nanji Kalidas Mehta’s Dream Half-Expressed
Nanji Kalidas Mehta, the Gujarati plantation owner and industrialist who first sailed across the Indian Ocean to East Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, is widely known in the region for the large business firms that he founded. Such businesses include sugar plantations and processing plants at Lugazi in Uganda and Muhoroni in Kenya, sisal plantations in Tanzania, and several cotton ginneries in Uganda, all of which he set up in the fir…
Exile and Estrangement in East African Indian Fiction
East African Indian fiction, or rather fiction by East African writers of South Asian origin, presents memorable images of ceaseless wandering through strange territory, flight from home-spaces, violent expulsions, and the networks—imaginative and literal—that link the resultant diaspora communities. Ojwang’s article accounts for the different ways in which three key writers, M. G. Vassanji, Bahadur Tejani, and Peter Nazareth, have responded in t…
Reading Migration and Culture
This book uses the uniquely positioned culture of East African Asians to reflect upon the most vexing issues in postcolonial literary studies today. By examining the local histories and discourses tha
The half-caste and the dream of secularism and freedom
Focusing on the work of Bahadur Tejani, Peter Nazareth and Moyez Vassanji, this article attempts to account for the popularity of tropes of miscegenation in the literature produced by East African writers of South Asian descent. The appearance of the figure of the half-caste in this body of writing is especially striking given the fact that miscegenation was much derided in colonial discourse and viewed in fear by traditionalists within the diasp…
The bad Baniani sports good shoes
From the mid-nineteenth century when they began to assume a central role in the running of commercial activity on the East African seaboard, East Africans of South Asian origin have been the subject of stereotypes that have sought either to condemn or justify that role. Such stereotypes have been a tool through which social actors have attempted to come to terms with rapid changes in society; indeed, stereotypes have provided a vent for popular a…
The Pleasures of Knowing
Reading Migration and Culture
This book uses the uniquely positioned culture of East African Asians to reflect upon the most vexing issues in postcolonial literary studies today. By examining the local histories and discourses tha
The half-caste and the dream of secularism and freedom
Focusing on the work of Bahadur Tejani, Peter Nazareth and Moyez Vassanji, this article attempts to account for the popularity of tropes of miscegenation in the literature produced by East African writers of South Asian descent. The appearance of the figure of the half-caste in this body of writing is especially striking given the fact that miscegenation was much derided in colonial discourse and viewed in fear by traditionalists within the diasp…
The Pleasures of Knowing
The bad Baniani sports good shoes
From the mid-nineteenth century when they began to assume a central role in the running of commercial activity on the East African seaboard, East Africans of South Asian origin have been the subject of stereotypes that have sought either to condemn or justify that role. Such stereotypes have been a tool through which social actors have attempted to come to terms with rapid changes in society; indeed, stereotypes have provided a vent for popular a…
The Pleasures of Knowing
The bad Baniani sports good shoes
From the mid-nineteenth century when they began to assume a central role in the running of commercial activity on the East African seaboard, East Africans of South Asian origin have been the subject of stereotypes that have sought either to condemn or justify that role. Such stereotypes have been a tool through which social actors have attempted to come to terms with rapid changes in society; indeed, stereotypes have provided a vent for popular a…
The half-caste and the dream of secularism and freedom
Focusing on the work of Bahadur Tejani, Peter Nazareth and Moyez Vassanji, this article attempts to account for the popularity of tropes of miscegenation in the literature produced by East African writers of South Asian descent. The appearance of the figure of the half-caste in this body of writing is especially striking given the fact that miscegenation was much derided in colonial discourse and viewed in fear by traditionalists within the diasp…
Exile and Estrangement in East African Indian Fiction
East African Indian fiction, or rather fiction by East African writers of South Asian origin, presents memorable images of ceaseless wandering through strange territory, flight from home-spaces, violent expulsions, and the networks—imaginative and literal—that link the resultant diaspora communities. Ojwang’s article accounts for the different ways in which three key writers, M. G. Vassanji, Bahadur Tejani, and Peter Nazareth, have responded in t…
Reading Migration and Culture
This book uses the uniquely positioned culture of East African Asians to reflect upon the most vexing issues in postcolonial literary studies today. By examining the local histories and discourses tha
The Pleasures and Tribulations of Migration
The sense of displacement and estrangement that assails migrants and diasporas is one of the most enduring subjects of East African Asian fiction, which presents images of wandering through strange territory, flight from undesirable homes, expulsions from spaces held dear, the scattering of communities and attempts to restore a sense of wholeness amidst the threat of alienation. The figure of an exiled Indian narrator from a Third World country w…
Romancing Decolonization
This chapter discusses the representation of decolonization in the works of Jagjit Singh and Kuldip Sondhi, and the politics underlying such representation, by examining four topical questions that have preoccupied the writers: the scapegoating of the Asian diaspora through the use of stereotype in the era of independence, the idea of the nation-as-one, the nationalist politics of “integration” and the marginalization of the diaspora by the new s…
Memory, Metafiction and Modernity
An acute consciousness of, and concern about, the past and its possible recovery in memory pervades the work of Moyez Vassanji, with his narratives “probing into the past to account for a present that is increasingly chaotic,” but also reaching out from the present to make sense of a past whose nature in narrative is under continual formation. 1 The burdens under whose weight the writing labors are the troubled milieux of colonial and post-coloni…
Conclusion
The last two decades have been characterized by a burgeoning interest in the literature of the South Asian diaspora, especially those writers who have left their countries of birth, by choice or necessity, to settle in Canada, Britain, the United States and Australia. This increased visibility for South Asian diasporic writing can be accounted for partially by the spectacular success of writers such as Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee and Michae…
Gender, Sexuality and Community
In Chapter 4, I have considered how East African Asian writings depict the ways in which patriarchal interests among the Asian immigrants manipulate gender in attempts to mark the limits of identity. I have also examined what is at stake in such attempts to wrest control of the communal and personal imaginary. This chapter revisits that discussion, but deliberates more specifically on how the various interests within the diasporic groups in the w…
Imaging Africa, Making “Asians”
Ethnicity and race have occupied a key role in the socio-political struggles that have occurred in East Africa during the colonial and post-independence periods. However, within the atmosphere of the self-consciously secular and nationalist tradition of intellectual work in post-independence East Africa, there has been a reluctance to discuss ethnicity in any sustained manner. In fact, when ethnicity is raised as a topic for discussion, more ofte…
Gastropolitics and Diasporic Self-Writing
What people eat or drink provides in East African Asian literature what may be called, following Arjun Appadurai, “a peculiarly powerful semiotic device.” 1 Not only do food and drink evoke in members of immigrant Asian communities a sense of their past in the wake of multiple migrations into, within and out of East Africa, they are also a powerful index of a sense of security and belonging, or the feeling of being cast adrift in strange new worl…
Miscegenation and Culture
In a discussion of the history of the East African Indians, Dana April Seidenberg has argued that the relative proximity of the region to the Indian sub-continent has meant that the diaspora has tended to look to the land of origins as the sole locus of its cultural heritage and inspiration. Unlike the Caribbean case where the descendants of nineteenth century indentured Indian laborers were integral to the creation of a creolized culture that al…
Indian Ocean Travel and Belonging in Nanji Kalidas Mehta’s Dream Half-Expressed
Nanji Kalidas Mehta, the Gujarati plantation owner and industrialist who first sailed across the Indian Ocean to East Africa at the turn of the twentieth century, is widely known in the region for the large business firms that he founded. Such businesses include sugar plantations and processing plants at Lugazi in Uganda and Muhoroni in Kenya, sisal plantations in Tanzania, and several cotton ginneries in Uganda, all of which he set up in the fir…
Settled strangers
Between nostalgia and melancholia
Commerce is at the heart of over two thousand years of exchange between Africa and Asia, linkages that have been facilitated by Indian Ocean trade routes. But what if we approached these episodes o
Global Maritime and Colonial Histories (15 works) · History (14 works) · Sociology (13 works) · African history and culture studies (12 works) · Gender Studies (11 works) · Political science (11 works) · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Art (7 works)