Beschreibung:
<jats:p> This essay argues that the experience of diaspora compels a constitutive reckoning with the conceptual category of the universal. Refl ecting on Sunil Bhatia’s American Karma and Radika Mohanram’s Imperial White (which respectively deal with the contemporary Indian diaspora and the nineteenth-century “British diaspora”), the essay explores the extent to which the formulation of “white Britishness” in the colonies, as well as the self-representation of diasporic Indians both in Gandhi’s time and in suburban Connecticut today, have variously hinged on the liberal ideal of the abstract universal subject and its role in positioning diasporic subjects. The essay explores how the reciprocal self-defi nitions that emerge in these different diasporas render the “universal” a more weighted term. </jats:p>