Abstract
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.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature |
| Editors | Rajini Srikanth, Min Song |
| Place of Publication | Cambridge |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| Chapter | 29 |
| Pages | 503-518 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781107284289 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2015 |