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s I read Divya Praful Tolia-Kelly’s Landscape, Race and Memory, I was reminded of the famous words of Whisky Sisodia, the oppositional diasporic figure in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) whose stuttered quips remain the inspiration for post-colonial critiques of national identity and empire: “the trouble with the Engenglish is that their hiss hiss history happened overseas, so they dodo don’t know what it means” (page 343). Tolia-Kelly merges scholarship on transnational diaspora and post-colonial critiques of race and culture to reframe English heritage and history and to understand its landscapes through a “lens of mobility” (Tolia-Kelly, 2010: 22).  The multiple identities of South Asian diasporas are revealed in the book through the quotidian attachments to place and landscape as evinced through interviews, discussion groups on the visual and material cultures in the homes of South Asian women, and most significantly, in the creation of landscape paintings based on their narratives of ‘home.’  South Asian lives and experiences reside “at the heart of Englishness,” their “biographies reflect the footprint of the British Empire, its economies, natures and cultural sphere of influence” (page 4), and as illustrated throughout the book, their settlement in Britain de-stabilize conceptions of Englishness and indeed, diaspora.  South Asian “landscapes of post-colonial memory” (page 13) are therefore traced in the “everyday modes of memory work” (page 12) that further refine research on place and memory, the sites of home, and the multiplicity of diasporic identities and spaces.

Central to Tolia-Kelly’s examination of South Asian diasporic identities is her argument for an ecological approach to citizenship and identity.  Moving beyond the pitfalls of anti-racist identity politics in Britain and North America of the 1970s and 1980s that reified biological categories of race, ecologies of citizenship and identity stress the sensual, textual, and material connections with “soil, landscape, and iconographies of lived experience” (page 4) irreducible to “skin, nationality, economic status, political citizenship or religion” (page 7).  ‘Ecological’ is used to question the political distinction between ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ species that underwrite processes of naturalization and suggests that belonging must be placed in relation to memories of landscape, such as weather, plants, gardens, and roads.  These memories, Tolia-Kelly argues, position South Asian diasporas through landscapes of belonging across national borders and distinct processes of racialization in former colonies and Britain.  Thus, the ecological approach offers a novel study of identity and citizenship by viewing Britishness as diasporic, produced by post-colonial imaginaries of landscape (page 19).  Greater clarification of ecological citizenship and identity, however, would have helped in two key ways.  First, an ‘ecological’ approach implies a consideration of how diasporic memories of landscape contribute to human impacts on non-human species and their environment.  Such an inquiry is, of course, tangential to Tolia-Kelly’s analysis of belonging, identity, and citizenship, but is well situated within notions of ‘ecological.’  Secondly, I wondered how the ‘ecological approach’ is distinct from other allied concepts of diasporic connections and lived experience that could also be read in terms of place and landscape, most notably hybridity and cosmopolitanism.

As Tolia-Kelly explores in Chapter 2, expressions of belonging are on display through visual cultures, particularly in the role of cinema-going and the meanings of Hindi films in South Asia and the diaspora.  For instance, as two South Asian women described their sensory memories of cinemas in Nairobi and Kampala respectively, Tolia-Kelly analyzed their “privileging sensual experiences over specific coordinates, places and events” (page 30).  Migration brings together processes of racialization in Britain with the legacies of empire in the South Asian diaspora, producing a “territory of culture” that exceed the national, religious, and linguistic differences of South Asians (page 28).  Tolia-Kelly, however, cautions against homogenizing South Asian diasporas, and Chapter 4 is devoted to the diverse mobilities of South Asian migrations to Britain that include ‘twice’ and ‘triple’ migrants that have emigrated from sites in the South Asian diaspora. South Asian diasporic consciousness, it is argued, consists of “hybrid connections with the citizenship of many nations” that are often dissonant with the territorial nationalisms in India, East Africa, and Britain (page 61).

Tolia-Kelly further elaborates on the multi-stranded connections of South Asians by locating them in the possessions found in the home.  The objects range from small shrines to copper engravings that as “materials of heritage” (page 86) conceive multiple locations and identities.  The analysis of material cultures extends scholarship on the social life of commodities by suggesting that diasporic (re-)memory consists of “a perceived utopian, pre-colonial identity and one that is shaped by an imposed colonial regime of race-definition, and the lived experience of being a post-colonial within Britain” (page 96).  Although Tolia-Kelly is clear that the task of her research is to consider the ways diasporic identities consist of geographies that cannot be contained by the bounded territorialities of the nation-state, I wished that the important analysis of the objects found in the homes of South Asian women would be connected to their political contexts in South Asia.  Curiously, this elision potentially views Englishness as diasporic, while South Asia remains fixed, a seemingly steady reference for the mobilities of empire and diaspora.  A shrine, for instance, is assessed as “a spiritual place before it is a purely religious site,” representing “family biography” and “embedded events, moments, and aesthetic imprints” (page 91).  The shrine’s relation to politics of cultural nationalisms in South Asia, while acknowledged, is not further examined.

Tolia-Kelly provides a detailed account of her methodological approach that calls for grounding theory through participatory action research that seeks to enable the voices of South Asian migrant women.  In particular, the penultimate chapter engages in innovative methods by presenting the descriptions and sketches of landscapes of ‘home’ from South Asian women participants in a tangible form through paintings created by the landscape artist Melanie Carvalho.  The paintings create a “visual archive” and reflect the “ideal” landscapes of belonging, citizenship, and “home” (page 39) for South Asian women.  By visualizing memory through paintings, post-colonial (British Asian) citizenship is shaped through the nostalgia of landscapes in which, for example, “the scent of jasmine, the shade of the tamarind tree, the aesthetics of nature in the South, and the feel of the sun high in the sky are encountered with reverence” (page 137).  Tolia-Kelly’s emphasis on the multiple and varied connections to place and landscape that shape belonging, identity, and citizenship drew from oral histories, interviews on the visual and material cultures of the home, and in the creation of paintings.  Landscape, Race and Memory, therefore, is a much needed contribution to the South Asian diaspora and is also an important contribution to anyone interested in new research designs on migration, identity, and memory work. 

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Reference

Rushdie S (1988) The Satanic Verses. New York: Random House.