| Description |
This dissertation examines contemporary South Asian American literary works, written by writers of South Asian descent living and writing in the United States, and explores to what degree these works reflect or challenge the premises of an Asian American literary tradition. Historically, South Asian Americans have been peripheral to the canon of Asian American studies. Because of their diasporic and cosmopolitan sensibilities, South Asian Americans are inconsistently categorized, by scholars and the American public, as Indians, South Asians, and Asian Americans in different contexts. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 further complicate the position of South Asians, especially Sikhs and Muslims, within the traditional parameters of the Asian American community because they are now considered to pose a major threat to Americans. The dissertation contests some of the traditional premises of an Asian American identity based on the historic experiences of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Americans within a specifically US mainland context, particularly by looking at the intersectional relationships between US race relations, an Asian American critique of American imperialism, and the diasporic history of South Asians. Using a transnational approach, informed by postcolonial theory, the dissertation examines the complex global networks and dynamics at work within and beyond the United States in South Asian American literary texts. This approach, responsive to an era of "flexible citizenship," the politics of invisibility, and the "global war on terror," challenges us to reconsider the scope of South Asian American writing, which transforms in fundamental ways our sense of Asian American literature and the formation of Asian American identity. The dissertation brings the experiences of invisible subjects, particularly undocumented immigrants and refugees who remain mostly invisible in Asian American literary studies, into the conversation in order to help us re-envision a broader notion of Asian American identity, one more responsive to the twenty-first century, and expand the geographical and thematic boundaries of Asian American literature in particular, and American literature in general, beyond the United States. |
