Impossible Desires

A major intervention in queer, postcolonial, and cultural studies, Impossible Subjects rethinks the concept of diaspora through examinations of a range of South Asian diasporic literature, film, and music. Focusing on queer female diasporic subjectivity, Gaytri Gopinath develops a concept of diaspora apart from the logic of blood, authenticity, and patrilineal descent that she argues invariably forms the core of conventional formulations. She explains how the framework of a queer diaspora recuperates those desires, practices, and subjectivities that are rendered unimaginable within the dominant diasporic and nationalist imaginaries. A consideration of queerness becomes a way to challenge nationalist ideologies by restoring what has been rendered illegible or impossible: the impure, inauthentic, and non-reproductive. It suggests alternative ways of conceptualizing community and collectivity across disparate geographic locations, ways based in politics rather than blood or nostalgia for the homeland and times past. Gopinath juxtaposes diverse texts to indicate the range of oppositional practices, subjectivities, and visions of collectivity that fall outside mainstream narratives of colonialism, nationalism, liberal feminism, and gay and lesbian politics and theory. She considers British Asian music of the 1990s alongside alternative media and cultural practices. She examines literature including V. S. Naipaul's classic novel A House for Mr. Biswas, Ismat Chugtai's short story "The Quilt," Monica Ali's Brick Lane, Shyam Selvadurai Funny Face, and Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night. Analyzing films including Deepa Mehta's controversial Fire and Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding, she pays particular attention to how South Asian diasporic feminist filmmakers have reworked Bollywood's strategies of queer representation. Gopinath's readings are dazzling, and her insights and theoretical framework transformative and far-reaching.