Abstract
Taking the issue of home as its point of departure, this paper examines Indian director Mira Nair’s treatment of Indian diaspora in her 1991 film Mississippi Masala. It explores the idea that Nair, by carefully attending to the entanglements of racial problems and colonial history, delineates multi-layered racial conflicts in the post-colonial condition, on the one hand, and presents a diasporic view of home and migration in challenge of the racial/national exclusionism, on the other hand. Through the story of an Indian family’s repeated experience of migration, Mississippi Masala not only exposes the historical and structural oppression of white hegemony, but also valorizes fluid and hybrid identities, celebrates border-crossing, and seeks connections and development. Mississippi Masala is oriented towards the kind of multicultural society Benhabib envisions, one in which cultures continually negotiate with the imagined boundaries and create room for adjustments and evolution.