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Shame … acts as an internal social regulator, and most of the time, … it does an unobtrusively good job. But shame can also be a bully. Nastier by far than guilt, which is merely the feeling that o...

Jasvinder Sanghera’s autobiographical trilogy explores how the concept of shame is instrumentalised in the practice of forced marriage in South Asian British diasporic contexts. As corollar...

Chapter 10 focuses on a particular form of diasporic identity based on transnational adoptions of subcontinental Indian children by white European and US parents, as represented in two contemporary novels by diasporic women writers, Bharti Kirchner’s Shiva Dancing (1998) and Sharon Maas’s The Speech of Angels (2003). The moments of adoption and transnational movement to the new adoptive home spaces in both novels are examined, where the birth mother, the adoptive child, and the adoptive mother are the key actors in staging a range of feminized diasporic experiences. Navigating the vectors of geographical, kinship, and cultural differences embodied by transracially adopted children thus contributes to constructions of families and homes. Here the adoptee herself adopts the new home space (or tries to), so as to render herself commensurate with her white adoptive mothers’ desires for family. The chapter asks if the implementation of the adoption narrative as a literary device in these diasporic novels alludes to the (im)possibilities of the transracial adoptee being adopted by her new home space. In these negotiations of the home space and Otherness in the adoptive family, it is noted how power structures established in colonial contexts still operate in this particular diasporic experience.

Frank SCHULZE-ENGLER: Introduction Theoretical Perspectives Wolfgang WELSCH: On the Acquisition and Possession of Commonalities Gisela WELZ: Multiple Modernities: The Transnationalization of Cultures Virginia RICHTER: Authenticity: Why We Still Need It Although It Doesn't Exist Sissy HELFF: Shifting Perspectives: The Transcultural Novel Ruth MAYER: The Dangers of Diaspora: Some Thoughts About the Black Atlantic Dirk WIEMANN: The Times of India: Transcultural Temporalities in Theory and Fiction Peter STUMMER: Lakshman's Journal: An Essay in Narratology and the Barbs of Transculturality Transcultural Realities Mike PHILLIPS: Broken Borders: Migration, Modernity and English Writing - Transcultural Transformation in the Heart of Europe Axel STAHLER: From the Belly of the Fish: Jewish Writers in English in Israel: Transcultural Perspectives Pascal FISCHER: Linguistic Dimensions of Jewish-American Literature Edith SHILLUE: Eluding Containment: Orality and the Ordnance Survey Memoir in Ireland Kerstin KNOPF: Atanarjuat: Fast Running and Electronic Storytelling in the Arctic Michaela MOURA-KOCOGLU: Manifestation of Self and/or Tribal Identity? Maori Writing in the Global Maelstrom Sabrina BRANCATO: Transcultural Perspectives in Caribbean Poetry Transcultural Fictions Mark STEIN: The Location of Transculture Eva Ulrike PIRKER: 'Final Passages'? Representations of Black British History in Caryl Phillips's Novel and Its Television Adaptation Barbara SCHAFF: Trying to Escape, Longing to Belong: Roots, Genes and Performativity in Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Hari Kunzru's The Impressionist Nadia BUTT: Fictions of Transcultural Memory: Zulfikar Ghose's The Triple Mirror of the Self as an Imaginative Reconstruction of the Self in Multiple Worlds Christine VOGT-WILLIAM: Routes to the Roots: Transcultural Ramifications in Bombay Talkie Katja SARKOWSKY: Beyond the Contact Zone? Mapping Transcultural Spaces in Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen and Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach Silke STROH: The Long Shadow of Tacitus: Classical and Modern Colonial Discourses in the Eighteenth- and Early-Nineteenth-Century Scottish Highlands Teaching Transculturality Sabine DOFF: Inter- and/or Transcultural Learning in the Foreign Language Classroom? Theoretical Foundations and Practical Implications Michael C. PRUSSE: Towards a Cosmopolitan Readership: New Literatures in English in the Classroom Laurenz VOLKMANN: Teaching Hanif Kureishi Kanaka Bashyam SANKARAN: A New Dialogue at the Periphery? Teaching Postcolonial African, Black American, and Indian Writings in India Look, See, and Say: Photographs of Africa in a Cultural Perspective Detlev GOHRBANDT: Transcultural Communication, Poetics, and Viewer Response in Photography Gisela FEURLE: Teaching and Learning with Photographs of Africa Notes on Contributors