Axel, Brian. The Nation's Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh “Diaspora.” Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.

Abstract

What makes a certain people a 'diaspora?'" and "Where is the homeland?" are principal questions Axel asks in The Nation's Tortured Body. Axel chronicles the formation of Sikh communities and the fight for Khalistan, an autonomous Sikh nation, and questions whether sharp distinctions can be made between diasporas and homelands. In fact, he argues, the limitations of some contemporary scholarship theorizing diasporas has been the tendency to treat the homeland as a point of origin. Such work is flawed, he asserts, because the paradigm in which it operates requires one to reduce the diaspora to that which is inauthentic, a replica. Challenging this logic, Axel inverts the paradigm and asserts that it is through the diaspora that the homeland is constituted. In this regard, he restores a sense of motion to theorizing the circulation of ideas, information, and, yes, bodies between diasporas and homelands. Yet, despite his criticism, Axel firmly insists that there are limitations to questioning the categories diaspora and homeland. In this way, Axel attempts to distance his work from scholars who have argued that homelands and diasporas are "imaginary"-work that he argues has resulted in an odd spatiotemporal duality, wherein the homeland is understood to be a lost relic of a past time, and the diaspora a present configuration-while also disputing the utility of constructing such firm distinctions.Just as boundaries are inscribed on the homeland, Axel asserts, so they are on the body. Beginning with his title, which nicely juxtaposes nation and body, Axel beautifully weaves the two together throughout the book. Through both archival and ethnographic analysis, he demonstrates how the body not only carries the markings of sociopolitical and cultural change but also acts as an agent of these transformations. The politics of place, he suggests, meets the politics of body in the dialectical relation of the total body, which he identifies as the amritdhari (unwounded) man's body, whose images were first circulated in colonial portraiture, and the tortured body, images of which began circulating on the internet as violent actions taken against Sikhs in India became common practice. The body thus signifies more than Sikh subjectivity; changes in representations of the Sikh body, Axel asserts, reflect the formation of the diaspora itself. His consideration of the relationship between the body, the diaspora, and the nation could have been enhanced by drawing more closely upon the richness of his fieldwork. Overall, however, Axel's book is an impressive work that should be widely read among scholars of identity, nationalism, diaspora, or South Asia.---Bridget Guarasci 214