Emotional Geographies of Belonging in Ravinder Randhawa's Beauty and the Beast

Emotional Geographies of Belonging in Ravinder Randhawa's Beauty and the Beast Shilpi Saxena (bio) and Diksha Sharma (bio) We are different from our parents. We have [...] other values and ideas about living in Germany. They are the foreigners, not us. But we are still far from being German. So what are we then? What do we want to be? (Bota et al. 10; qtd.in Röttger-Rössler 237) In their articulation of their experiences as the children of immigrants in Germany in Wir Neuen Deutschen [We New Germans], Alice Bota, Khuê Pham, and Özlem Topçu clearly express the central concern of this essay: the emotional valence of home and belonging for so-called "second-generation immigrants" who grow up in what Vijay Mishra describes as a "vacuum culture" (184), with ambiguous relationships to their parents' country of origin as well as to that in which they are citizens. The emotional ambivalence illustrated here finds expression in Ravinder Randhawa's Beauty and the Beast, originally published in 1992 with the title Hari-Jan. Set in the 1990s, the novel traces the complex experiences of three Asian British teens—Harjinder (Hari-jan), Ghazala, Suresh—who find themselves straddling two cultures, identities, and lands. Randhawa's narrative poses difficult questions about home and belonging in the diasporic context where immigrant families are trapped within a liminal space, striving for recognition and a place in society. Highlighting the interplay between migration, citizenship, and the emotional sense of belonging, this essay demonstrates how diasporic communities negotiate the complex matrix of citizenship and social identity through cultural acts or performances. We argue that the novel illustrates how the children of immigrants rewrite their citizenship status by staking claims to multilocal identities while retaining political affiliations to nation-states. Here emotions are instrumental for understanding the experiences of immigration and the shifting contours of modern-day citizenship. It is indeed this productive intersection of emotions and migration that is invoked, revisited, and re-theorized here to demonstrate how the notions of home and belonging are challenged and influenced while traversing cross-cultural boundaries. More specifically, the study explores how immigrants transcend social, cultural, and geographical boundaries by redefining their [End Page 249] homes and identifications; in the process they construct new ways of negotiating the emotional geographies of place and belonging by positioning themselves in multilocal spaces. Cultural Citizenship in the Context of Migration Of primary importance within the context of migration is the notion of citizenship, which has far more layers of meaning than legal citizenship. In an era of globalization marked by "movement, relocation, displacement" (Gilroy, Black Atlantic 111), the concept of citizenship evokes a political tradition that is a matter of global debate and concern. Hence, it is difficult to fully grasp the definition of citizenship, as its connotations vary according to "social, political and cultural context and reflect different historical legacies" (Lister 3). In legal and political terms, citizenship is more often thought to be about the rights and obligations associated with membership, which inevitably leads to questions of who is to be included and excluded from the political community and under what conditions (Solomos 46). Such normative notions of citizenship often disregard the social codes and conventions that reproduce cultures and identities by which migrants construct communities of belonging. And it is indeed this cultural dimension of belonging that gives salience to the idea of "cultural citizenship." In this era of migration and globalization, the concept of cultural citizenship has evolved as an important concept that allows minorities to be different, and to be respected as such, without revoking their rights of belonging to a participatory community.1 This cultural aspect of citizenship is concerned crucially with recognition and respect for a wide range of cultural practices. Nevertheless, this intervention is in no way a quick-fix solution for diasporic concerns associated with the notions of home, identity, and belonging; rather, it focuses on how the emotional acts of allegiance and cultural performances provide new possibilities to

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