American Studies and South Asian diasporic writing. A comparative horizon
Abstract
On tracing the radical revisionism of American Studies’ cultural and methodological paradigms, this intervention will specifically investigate the multicultural and transnational turn of the field, whose material and conceptual boundaries have been increasingly confronting other extra-national literary traditions, such as those from the Indian subcontinent. The relationship between the USA and the postcolonial diasporas from India and Pakistan resounds with the political and intellectual Asian American experience of the Sixties and the Seventies, and configures a literary space that simultaneously addresses the migratory flows from many South Asian countries in the last decades of the previous century, as well as globalization’s challenges: citing works by first and second generation South Asian American writers such as Amitav Ghosh, Bharati Mukherjee and Jhumpa Lahiri, I will highlight the complex intercultural dialogue that these authors entertain with multiple linguistic and national collectivities.
Keywords: literary multiculturalism in the USA; Indian diaspora; Asian American literature; postcolonialism
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