Melancholic Travelers: Autonomy, Hybridity and the Maternal

The book analyzes traveling post-colonial subjects in recent prose by women writers of South Asian origin, tracing the links between the tropes of femininity, silence, loss, and migration. Traveling is understood as an act of generating meaning out of movement, displacement and migration, while the position of traveling subjects is seen as that of a paradoxical liminality, yet carrying the insurgent potential of finding new modes of agency. The argument evolves from crossing boundaries of one’s own body towards radical transgression of borders of identity. Before the traveler is able to transgress the limitations exhorted by forces beyond a single person’s grasp, she has to establish the boundaries of her own identity - only in order to shed its steadiness and discover liberating instability.