Relationality and the Transnational Indian Family in Shauna Singh Baldwin's "Nothing Must Spoil this Visit"

Abstract

In Shauna Singh Baldwin’s “Nothing Must Spoil this Visit,” Arvind, a Toronto-based Sikh, returns to the homeland to visit his family with his new wife Janet, a white Canadian of Hungarian origin. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, this article discusses Baldwin’s short story with a view to showing how the Indian context proves crucial in deconstructing the intersecting forms of fetishism upon which Arvind’s and Janet’s multicultural and inter-relationship is based. At stake in this text, I argue, is the somehow counterintuitive truth that the transnational tendencies of the contemporary world are definitely not an occasion for creating more border-crossings, more plurality, more confrontations and interaction. In this return narrative, migration is indeed presented as working in favour of, not against, fixed notions of identity.