Imagining Apna Panjab in Cyberspace

Abstract

Through examining the cultural practices of the Punjabi Canadian diaspora, including visual arts like film, and performing genres like music and dance, I shall trace multiple patterns of belonging among the community that characterize its engagement with other Canadian groups while retaining cultural continuity with the Punjabi homeland. I shall link multiple belongings to advancement in travel and communication technologies. Through my disciplinary location in English and personal in Hindu Punjabi, I will fan out to postcolonial and postmodern theory to deconstruct the diaspora as a construct. I suggest that Punjabi diaspora be viewed as an ethno-spatial complexrather than a social form(Area Studies) or a type of consciousness(Diaspora theory). By tracing the shared Punjabi ethno-spatial memory, I argue that disjoining the Sikh path from Punjabi culture can open the way to the critical disengagement of religion from culture in the imagining of Indian religious diasporas around the world.