Tracing the Relational Ethic in the Postcolonial Life Writing of the Indo-Fijian Diaspora

Despite the celebratory stance adopted by proponents of globalisation towards migration and transnationalism, many diasporic subjects experience geographical and cultural displacement as dispossession and loss. It is most evident in the life writing of post-indenture descendants of the nineteenth-century Indian diaspora in Fiji who are, de facto, living in a state of perpetual exile. In this article, I examine the life-writing texts of two Indo-Fijian writers, Satendra Nandan and Brij Lal, for the centrality they accord to the relational ethic through which they foreground the experiences of their community. While Nandan deploys a melodramatic aesthetic in his life writing to elicit sympathy for his post-indenture community's predicament, Lal interweaves disciplinary history with creative autobiography to make an interventionist gesture through which he recuperates an agential role for his Indo-Fijian community. I argue for broadening the archive of postcolonial diasporic literature by including such texts that resist the triumphalist rhetoric of de-territorialisation and transnationalism.