Gayatri Gopinath

Nostalgia, Desire, Diaspora: South Asian Sexualities in Motion

In Funny Boy, Sri Lankan-Canadian writer Shyam Selvadurai’s 1994 novel in six stories, the upper-middle-class Sri Lankan Tamil narrator traces a seven-year period of his childhood and adolescence that preceded the TamilSinhalese riots of 1983 and his family’s subsequent migration to Canada.’ This experience of migration is the grounds upon which the narrative unfolds; the novel is structured in terms of remembrance, with the narrator, Arjie, recalling a “remembered innocence of childhood . . . now colored in the hues of a twilight sky’’ (5). Such a phrase, coming early on in the novel, seems to signal that the text can be comfortably contained within a conventional genre of exile literature, one that evokes from the vantage point of exile an idyllic, coherent, preexilic past shattered by war and dislocation. Similarly, the novel’s parallel narrative of Arjie’s sexual awakening initially locates the text within an established genre of “coming out” stories, where the protagonist grows into an awareness of his “true,” homosexual identity.

Queer Visual Excavations: Akram Zaatari, Hashem El Madani, and the Reframing of History in Lebanon

I nhis coedited bookHashemElMadani: Studio Practices (2004), theBeirut-based Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari selects, reprints, and arranges the photographs of Hashem El Madani, a studio photographer from Saida (Sidon), Zaatari’s coastal hometown in south Lebanon. The book was created to coincide with the first exhibition of El Madani’s work in the United Kingdom,which was cocurated by Zaatari at the Photographer’s Gallery in London in 2004. El Madani opened his Studio Shehrazade in Saida in 1953 and over more than fifty years created hundreds of thousands of images of Saida’s residents: brides and grooms, wrestlers and babies, and Palestinian and Syrian resistance fighters in the 1970s. The images inHashem El Madani date from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s and tell of everyday life and the self-representational practices in the mid-twentieth-century city. Zaatari’s fascination with El Madani’s work stems from his interest in the making of modernity in Lebanon, specifically in the role of image-making practices such as studio photography. Of special interest to Zaatari is El Madani as a chronicler of everyday life in south Lebanon, a region rendered other in relation to the larger Lebanese nation by successive waves of war and Israeli occupation between 1978 and 2000. InHashem ElMadani Zaatari as artist and curator reproduces and organizes images he finds especially significant and moving from El Madani’s vast collection. It is striking that of the thousands of negatives in El Madani’s collection, a great many of the images reprinted by Zaatari suggest gender nonconformity or same-sex