‘Naipaul’s daughter’? Queer/cross-racial satire in Valmiki’s Daughter
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19006002 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kerry–jane Wallart (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 10 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 139-153 |
| Publication date | 2018-04-18 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | South Asian Diaspora (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1943-8184 • E-ISSN: 1943-8192 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/19438192.2018.1460926 |
| OpenAlex | W2800935751 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 16 |
Shani Mootoo’s Valmiki’s Daughter (2008) is mostly set in Trinidad’s East Indian minority community, one which becomes associated both with (hetero)normativity and with a subversion of the ‘national consensus’ through its claims to racial and cultural specificity. Racial and gendered social norms are recurrently posited and transgressed, in actual fact or through a discourse of resistance. Valmiki’s Daughter superimposes Viveka’s and the narrator’s distanced perspectives in relation to Indianness, especially in its dealings with the sexual/gendered body, and with the other ethnic groups in Trinidad. Norms are seen as objects of ridicule but also as a potential site for renewed social configurations; I connect this interrogation of normativity with the device of satire. The link is corroborated by the intertext of Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), a largely satirical novel where, as in Valmiki’s Daughter, (not) belonging becomes a metafictional concern. As this article demonstrates, Naipaul’s legacy is the occasion for Mootoo to revisit satiric modes so as to project inclusive but evolving social links. She extends the critique, but also the possible evolution, to readerly practices of identification as well as to the transgressive and corrective potentialities of language
Daughter · Ethnic group · Political science · Politics · Queer · Sociology · Subversion · Transgressive · Anthropology · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Gender Studies · Law · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |