Book contents
- The Cambridge History ofAsian American Literature
- The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Early Forms of Expression to the Start of the Twentieth Century
- Part II The Exclusion Era, World War II, and the Immediate Postwar Era
- Part III The Asian American Movement
- Part IV Canons
- 16 The Emergence of Asian American Literature as an Academic Field
- 17 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and the Impact of Theory
- 18 Heterogeneity to Multiplicity: Building Asian American Literary Critique
- 19 Whose Asias?
- 20 The South Asian American Challenge
- 21 Contemporary Filipino American Writers and the Legacy of Imperialism
- Part V Post-1965 and the Twenty-First Century
- Part VI Twenty-First Century: 9/11, Empire, and Other Challenges to Literature
- Bibliography
- Index
19 - Whose Asias?
from Part IV - Canons
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2015
By
Book contents
- The Cambridge History ofAsian American Literature
- The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Early Forms of Expression to the Start of the Twentieth Century
- Part II The Exclusion Era, World War II, and the Immediate Postwar Era
- Part III The Asian American Movement
- Part IV Canons
- 16 The Emergence of Asian American Literature as an Academic Field
- 17 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and the Impact of Theory
- 18 Heterogeneity to Multiplicity: Building Asian American Literary Critique
- 19 Whose Asias?
- 20 The South Asian American Challenge
- 21 Contemporary Filipino American Writers and the Legacy of Imperialism
- Part V Post-1965 and the Twenty-First Century
- Part VI Twenty-First Century: 9/11, Empire, and Other Challenges to Literature
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter describes the work of several South Asian diasporic novelists, namely Salman Rushdie, Hari Kunzru, Mohsin Hamid and Bharati Mukherjee. These works invite a reframing of Asia not as a singular category but as a pluralized and shifting matrix of identity positions, albeit notionally anchored to nation-state formations. The need to pluralize Asia and complicate received formations of Asian identities is even more pressing in North America, where Indian Americans are not the predominant Asian American ethnic group. Diasporic South Asian self-fashioning is a complicated matter in the works of Salman Rushdie. The Asia projected by liberal Western multiculturalist discourse is not necessarily the Asia envisioned by Asians, whether they live in South Asia or elsewhere. This then is one of the reasons to pluralize both national and diasporic self-fashioning. Cosmopolitanism and transnationalism are recurrent themes in many recent South Asian diasporic novels, challenging essentialist constructions of national and personal authenticity.
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- The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature , pp. 339 - 354Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015