The Transnational Imaginaries of M. G. Vassanji ― Diaspora, Literature, and Culture

This collection of scholarly articles engages with, analyzes, and appreciatively critiques the fiction and non-fiction writing of M. G. Vassanji, a multiple award-winning author. Vassanji’s works have a sense of multiple connections across four continents: Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. He challenges the imperial centers of Western powers through the content of his work and his deeply-felt humanist engagements with the politics of displacement, settlement, partition and postcolonialism. Ranging across almost his entire oeuvre, the essays in this book argue that Vassanji’s work should be read as one emerging from a transnational space that connects people, places and issues across the world. Collectively, the essays in this book, using a range of theoretical frameworks, claim that Vassanji’s work fits into and also goes beyond the usual categorizations, structures and styles of analysis applied to writers from the colonies.

Karim Murji is a Professor in the Graduate School at the University of West London and was previously based at the Open University, UK. His recent books include Racism, Policy and Politics (Policy Press, 2017) and, edited with John Solomos, Theories of Race and Ethnicity: Contemporary Debates and Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2015). With Sarah Neal, he is the Editor of Current Sociology.

Asma Sayed is a professor in the Department of English at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Canada. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on Indian Ocean Studies, Postcolonial Literature, and South Asian diaspora in Canada. Her work has appeared in leading academic journals including the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, Canadian Literature, South Asian Review, Transnational Literature, and the Journal of South Asian Diaspora. Her recent books include M. G. Vassanji: Essays on His Work (Guernica, 2014), Writing Diaspora: Transnational Memories, Identities and Cultures (Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2014), and Screening Motherhood in Contemporary World Cinema (Demeter Press, 2016).