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3 results

  • Chapter 16 - Diasporic Longings

  • from Part IV - Diaspora and the Transnational Turn
  • Edited by Asha Nadkarni, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, University of Texas, Austin
  • Book:
    Asian American Literature in Transition, 1965–1996
    Published online:
    08 June 2021
    Print publication:
    17 June 2021, pp 297-309

  • Summary

    Using diaspora as a framework for reading Asian American literature expands the geographical and temporal contours of what it means to be Asian American. Although late-twentieth-century US popular culture was marked by multicultural ideologies of American citizenship, “diaspora” captures another way of thinking about Asian Americans: as immigrants who are subject to multiple projects of nationalism, and who embody diverse forms of citizenship. Whereas writers like Bharati Mukherjee reproduce dominant ideologies of US exceptionalism and multicultural citizenship, for writers such as Meena Alexander, the production of diasporic locality ripples across generations, as she ties together South Asia with North America, the Middle East with Europe. Rewriting immigration as a story of diaspora emphasizes the social, economic, political, and psychic ties that immigrants construct to Asia and to the Americas. Diaspora thus reconfigures who and what we know as “Asian American,” moving away from linear narratives of departure and arrival, towards transnational categories of belonging and citizenship.

  • 29 - The 9/11 of Our Imaginations: Islam, the Figure of the Muslim, and the Failed Liberalism of the Racial Present

  • from Part VI - Twenty-First Century: 9/11, Empire, and Other Challenges to Literature
  • Edited by Rajini Srikanth, University of Massachusetts, Boston, Min Hyoung Song, Boston College, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature
    Published online:
    05 December 2015
    Print publication:
    01 December 2015, pp 503-518

  • 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.