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In her recent novel, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (2006), Anita Rau Badami describes the relationship of the diasporic Sikh community in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia to their ancestral "home" in the affective register of loss and longing:
A taut rope tied them all to "home," whether India or Pakistan. They saw their distant home as if through a telescope, every small wound or scar or flare back there exaggerated, exciting their imaginations and their emotions, bringing tears to their eyes. They were like obsessed stargazers, whose distance from the thing they observed made It all the brighter, all the more important. (65)
Such a fetishistic invocation of a remote, distant home is a strategy common to people who for whatever reason find themselves fully or partially alien in their current land. Indeed, it is perhaps the defining characteristic of diasporic consciousness, revealing as it does the incommensurability between home and lived reality-the modifiers "exaggerated," "brighter," "more important" remind readers that home, for the diasporic subject, is nearly always spelled with a capital H. But this diasporic attitude is more than a coping strategy, something Badami's novel traces in the consequences of the Sikh community's infatuation with Home as the lost or imaginary object. As she represents the violent potential of their long-distance nationalism, which culminates in her fictional reworking of the plot to bomb Air India Flight 182 in 1985, Badami reminds us in many ways that a term like "diaspora" is not simply a synonym for passive nostalgia. A novel like Badami's thus disaggregates the positive connotations that the term diaspora acquires in some of its postcolonial articulations (Appardurai; Bhabha 1994; Rushdie). What is more, in the case of Sikh separatists and their mission to create a homeland, Khalistan, on the Indian subcontinent, Badami helpfully questions the idea that diasporic identity is constituted in relation to an actual place, an originary home; instead, we could consider it as part of what Brian Keith Axel calls the "diasporic imaginary," where diaspora is created "through formations of temporality, affect, and corporeality" and identity, like the homeland, is "generative of diasporic subjects" (412).
So if diasporic identity is, like other ways of being in the world, an intersubjective production, then we require...