WAY IN THE WORLD Does the term 'Diaspora Art' mean different things to different people? Should we bother using it in today's globalized times? Sharmistha Ray provides answers and poses questions.

SOUTH ASIAN DIASPORA ART IS VARIED AND MULTIVALENT. IF there's one thing all diaspora artists agree on, it's that there isn't any singular definition of what diaspora art is. For some artists, the term itself is problematic. While their work may have social or political subtexts related to major issues surrounding the diasporic experience of cultural migration, these artists doggedly resist being labelled in this way.

Certainly, the personal and professional experiences of diaspora artists vary across the spectrum. So, their approaches to deconstructing their experiences in their art are understandably multiple too. No system of categorization has yet been devised that can effectively group so-called 'diaspora artists' together. Except, perhaps, for the fact that they all live outside of India, unifying them under a single banner is an unwieldy proposition. However, the mere fact of being dispersed from one's homeland, be it a matter of personal choice or generational migration, has widespread implications. These are, obviously, not restricted to South Asia, but apply to immigrant communities and populations the world over.

The post-colonial discourses that dominated cultural debates in the 1990s prioritized discussions about cultural rights, belonging and identity politics. But, post-9/11, debates about globalization have taken precedence in defining the new world order and require a re-positioning of migrant communities within a larger, more complicated framework. From postcolonialism to globalization, a general trajectory of diaspora art can be traced over the past decade that is in alignment with contemporary ideas about the 'migrant experience'.

Here, I have sketched four basic categories for the ideological evolution of diaspora art: The Self in a New World, The Collective Sensibility and Issues of Representation, The New Generation post 9/11 and the Hyper-Intensive Globalized World, "Globalization of the Local" and the Particularization of Experience. The categories are not strictly chronological. Instead, they are based on ideological positions that overlap, intersect or, at times, even run parallel to one another.

I. The Self in a New World

The politics of migration, identity and belonging was at the heart of artistic investigation for the first generation of artists from the South Asian diaspora - practitioners of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian and Sri Lankan descent - that emerged in the 1990s in London, New York and Toronto. First and second-generation immigrants (however displaced) found similar cultural linkages and shared histories that blurred the borders of their respective homelands. Therefore, their politics, concerns and practices converged. They had an impetus to create a common space for themselves in their new, alien context that reflected their experience of being neither here nor there.

The condition of existing in this in-between space required constant negotiations with self and place. There was a need to locate identity and trace migratory trajectories in order to map a visual language of displacement. The inward-looking nature of this investigation involved dealing with the past (of colonial and post-colonial India, for instance), while also relating this history to their altered situations in Western metropolitan centres. This self-conscious investigation was enabled by the institutionalization of Post-colonial thought in the 1990s. Since the late 1970s and throughout the 1990s, theorists like Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Homi Bhabha have created a 'language' of post-colonialism that could be adopted by a generation of 'subaltern artists' to express their ethnopolitical concerns. Spivak further canonized 'subaltern politics' for women by identifying and exposing acts of gender subjugation, providing a precedent for non-Western women in academia, literature and the arts.

Bengali-American sculptor and installation artist Rina Banerjee maps out a hybrid terrain that investigates cultural binaries. She draws upon romantic iconographies from India and heightens the exotic nature of her objects through ornamentation and theatrical display, while also using formalist tools to construct a visual language that has its roots in the West.

Banerjee's use of the imaginary as an entry point into cultural dialogue has mirrored the practices of other contemporary women artists who gained recognition around the same time - notably the African-American Kara Walker, Pakistani Shahzia Sikander and Iranian-born Shirin Neshat. One of Banerjee's most significant works in this regard, Take Me, Take Me, Take Me.To the Palace of Love (2003) first exhibited at Mass MoCA in the show Yankee Remix from 2003 to 2004, alongside large installations by Ann Hamilton and Annette Messager, was an opulent, floating pink plasticwrapped copper and steel armature of the Taj Mahal. Inside it, were three towering objects - a chandelier, a chair and a globe. A floral chandelier hung from the central interior's large dome and an 18th century floating black wooden Victorian armchair was supported in turn by a plexiglass plate.Below the chair and resting on the floor was a black vintage globe made of semi-precious stones.

Banerjee's wry theme-park reconstruction of a popular historical monument deftly subverted its social, historical and cultural significance via this de-contextualization. The outlandish colours and embellishments abstracted the original, reconstituting it within layers of allusion and makebelieve. The transformation of found, antique objects into objects of desire questioned their authenticity; in addition, their juxtaposition with fabricated sculptures blurred the boundaries between the real and the imagined. When the issue of authenticity enters an original document, the document becomes fictionalized. Banerjee's magnum opus was such a fiction on a grand scale. The Palace of Love displaced written histories with fables of love in an imaginary environment of decadence, splendour and wealth. It was as if the glories of a distant past had been supplanted through the course of time and longing, by a vortex of invented memories and self-reflexive imaginings that betrayed a migrant's nostalgia for a place called home. Banerjee's deconstruction thereby engaged with a post-colonial discourse about the difficulty of positioning the self in the context of history and culture.

II. The Collective Sensibility and Issues of Representation

In the early part of this decade, few commercial or alternative spaces existed in New York that focused on Indian art - let alone South Asian diaspora art. Bose Pacia opened in Soho in New York in the 1994, but the commercial gallery tended to focus on Modern and Contemporary artists from the Indian mainland.

So, even though an artist like Banerjee was able to break into mainstream venues for contemporary art - she was included in the 2000 edition of the Whitney Biennial - other South Asian diaspora artists remained on the fringe. Their specific concerns were just too difficult for an American art world disconnected from their cultural source to understand.

New York-based South Asian diaspora artists like Jaishri Abichandani and Chitra Ganesh appropriated kitsch, clichés and other recognizable identifiers from their cultural roots in India to interrogate identity. Abichandani's Mind's Desire series (1998) used the formal symbol of the Mandala with elements of collage to juxtapose self-portraits with images of Hindu goddesses. Mind's Desire commented on the fragmented, feminist self in a way that addressed Western stereotypes of Indian women. Abichandani writes that the series was instigated by "the pain of never being seen as a whole spirit, but instead as a projection of everyone's desires and expectations."

In 2001, Chitra Ganesh started to appropriate Amar Chitra Katha comic books to subvert traditional representations of sexuality and gender. She created politically subversive hybrid creatures, dislocated from any kind of categorical identification. Abichandani and Ganesh represented the typical subaltern woman, mirroring Spivak's politics. Believing that women, and more specifically, subaltern women, had been deliberately excluded from institutional discourses about culture (and dehumanized in the process), Spivak's corrective philosophy laid the groundwork for a grassroots effort implemented by and for women.

Both Abichandani and Ganesh have been involved with other South Asian activist groups in New York, like the South Asian Lesbian and Gay Association (S.A.L.G.A) and women's organizations that campaign against domestic violence, like Sakhi. However, while these groups incorporated art as part of their broader mission statement, their social agenda took precedence. Diaspora art in New York needed its own grassroots movement. Abichandani, who had immigrated to New York with her family in 1983, had already been involved with Desh Pardesh, the South Asian Festival of Arts and Politics in Toronto in the mid-'90s. In 1997, Abichandani used this model to integrate art and feminism with the South Asian Women's Creative Collective (S.A.W.C.C) in New York. Ganesh was one of its founding members.

In the late '90s and early part of this decade, subaltern politics formed the core focus of South Asian women artists from the diaspora. Today, this post-colonial feminism, which laid the foundation for an organization like S.A.W.C.C , has been overshadowed post-9/11 by the overarching and complex machinations of a new global order, which has thrown all prior ideologies into a state of flux.