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Abstract. The main aim of this article is to reflect upon the identity of Goan literature in terms of literary production at home and abroad, i.e., the narratives of authors who live, write and publish in Goa and of migrants abroad who have made Goa a main theme of their work. We define migrant writers as those who have migrated from Goa to other parts of the world or who were born away from Goa but have maintained close ties with the land of their forefathers. We define their literary production as 'migration literature.'
Keywords: Goan literature, migration literature, literary system, literary works, readership
In Transit
Whenever a population is dislocated both beyond and within its national frontiers, all the cultural elements involved are transformed, literature among them. In his now classic text of postcolonial studies, The Location of Culture (1994), Homi Bhabha called for a new way of addressing cultures beyond the national model: "The very concepts of homogenous national cultures, the consensual or contiguous transmission of historical traditions, or 'organic' ethnic communities are in a profound process of redefinition" (5). After Bhabha, Rebecca Walkowitz ("The Location of Literature" 528) argues that in our present day, literature, too, is in a process of change and should be understood in terms of its heterogeneity and discontinuity rather than in terms of any homogeneous, monolingual, national literary tradition.
As we see it, this does not mean that organic literary identities mix to the point of losing their distinctive features. Neither does it mean that they can coexist without any kind of pressure to homogenize motivated by diverse causes, mainly for political and economic reasons. Rather, we argue that they have gone through reconfigurations of different kinds, whose dynamic is quite evident, but whose consequences are complex, making it difficult to point out the future scenario of literary traditions as we know them today.
In the so-called "Age of Globalization", writers can write about home from the other side of the globe in both the language of the homeland and of the host country, just as one language can be associated with more than one culture, as is the case of the Portuguese language or the English language, or more than one language can be spoken...