South Asian migration during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was largely comprised of indentured labourers sent to British colonies after the 1833 abolition of slavery. Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture uses the critical paradigm of 'indenture history' to examine the local literary and cultural histories that have influenced and shaped the development of novel-length fiction by writers of the South Asian diaspora in national contexts as diverse as Mauritius, South Africa, Guyana, and Fiji.
Mariam Pirbhai perceptively identifies common patterns, developments, and concerns in this cross-continental body of writing, including a 'vocabulary of indenture' that invokes the mythology and plight of the indentured labourer among a newly reconstituted community of colonial émigrés. Pirbhai's innovative study considers authors who fall outside the established canon of post-colonial writing, challenging readers to reconsider traditional peripheries as centres of literary and cultural production that have made significant contributions to the Anglophone novel.

Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific

Literature & Fiction

Pirbhai, Mariam

British & Irish

University of Toronto Press

Fiction. Women's Studies. Short Fiction. South Asian Studies. Winner of an IPPY Gold Medal for Multicultural Fiction. A Haitian woman survives the ravages of an earthquake only to find her sister, an émigré in Montreal, the subject of a grisly crime. A chambermaid in a Mexican tourist resort frequented by Canadian tourists wonders why all the men in her life seem to leave her for distant lands. A Jamaican migrant worker at an Ontario chicken farm comes to the aid of his Peruvian co-worker on the eve of a fatal car accident. And a young Pakistani-Canadian woman finds herself in the midst of a protest march defending Muslim women's rights on the same day she has agreed to meet her Moroccan lover. The diverse cast of characters that energize Mariam Pirbhai's OUTSIDE PEOPLE AND OTHER STORIES not only reflects a multicultural Canada but also the ease with which this striking debut collection inhabits the voices and perspectives of nation, hemisphere, and world.

Outside People and Other Stories (Inanna Poetry & Fiction Series)

Contemporary

Inanna Publications

When a rock, a threatening letter, and a burning Quran are thrown into a mosque on the outskirts of Toronto, religious leaders and the police shrug it off as an isolated incident. But many see it as a hate crime. Among them is Kashif Siddiqui, the son of Pakistani immigrants. Kashif joins a group of volunteers at an Islamic Cultural Centre on a security watch during the festive Eid night, a potential target of another attack. When an attack materializes, Eid night becomes a test of friendship, family, and faith for the community; it also ends in near-tragedy and a declaration of love and reconciliation. Recommended by CBC Books, Quill & Quire, Hamilton Review of Books, the Toronto International Festival of Authors, and FOLD (Festival of Literary Diversity), Isolated Incident is Mariam Pirbhai's debut novel. Isolated Incident depicts the disturbing rise in hate-crimes directed at Canadian Muslims living in Ontario and Quebec, while also calling into question issues of land and belonging for both immigrant and settler. Will the children of South Asian immigrants, like Kashif Siddiqui and Arubah Anwar, be able to cultivate a new relationship to what is at once an Indigenous and colonized land-even as they are, themselves, under attack for their difference and their beliefs? Pirbhai enters provocative new territory in Canadian literature, seeing in the Pakistani-Canadian and Muslim diasporas a reservoir of experience and story, where questions of faith and community, migration and citizenship, misogyny and Islamophobia, are central to the political and social tenor of our times. As Quill & Quire reviewer Zeahaa Rehman notes, "reading Isolated Incident is not unlike receiving a series of pinpricks that ultimately form a bruise in the reader's heart, reminding them of their relationship to the deeply rooted Islamophobia in Canada."

Isolated Incident

Literary

Mawenzi House/TSAR Publishers

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