Queer diasporas: literary diaspora studies and the law

This essay aims to examine the interactions between the discourses of law, queerness and diaspora through reference to literary representation in three novels: Hanif Kureishi’s Buddha of Suburbia (1990), Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy (1994), and Lloyd Jones’s Hand Me Down World (2010). The aim of bringing the interdisciplinary movement of law and literature into dialogue with the field of diaspora in its critical alignment with gay studies is to identify the part the law plays in fictional representations of the alternative structures of experience that queerness and diaspora point to. These can be traced to movements of scattering and fracturing and a positioning between various binaries such as nation and diaspora, heterosexuality and homosexuality, original and copy. The social and national exclusions due to the geographical movement and migration that identifies diaspora, and the sexual difference and non-heteronormativity that defines queerness, can be summarized as a shared sense of being “unhomed”.