Rahul Gherola

Thank you so much.

I'm absolutely delighted to be joining you all from Perth.

Lovely to have you along.

That's a great question.

So often in graduate school or what we call postgraduate studies here, you're trained to write and to think and write a certain way that's actually convoluted.

And it takes simple ideas and makes them complex.

So to reverse that, let me just say that I have examined over the past 15 years or so,

the migratory patterns of people from formerly colonized countries, namely in the Asian and African continents, to the United States and the United Kingdom.

And I've examined those migratory patterns through the lens of identity and the way that identities like race and class and gender and sexuality intersect under the umbrella category of home.

It's never an academic and abstract idea for me.

It's in the first instance, always already personal.

For example, my parents were born in

what was British India, but the city my mother was born in, Karachi, then became Pakistan, and the city my father was born in, Delhi, then became independent India.

So even in that crucible, even before I was born, issues of home and belonging and nationalism and migration have always been inflections throughout my family and family history.

The borders changed around.

In my mother's case, the borders changed around her without her even moving.

All of a sudden, she woke up as a young girl and she was in a new country where they were being asked to leave because of their religion.

i've been focusing a lot on a number of books that actually fit in beautifully with the novel that i did read for this program a transcending kingdom those so far um all fit into my unit that i'm teaching right now murdoch university with my very engaging students it's called cosmopolitan literature and this unit is actually examining the notion of what it means to be a global citizen

in and through very different kinds of works of literature that examine the very same themes that

Jesse is examining in her second novel.