The world next door
Subtitle: South Asian American literature and the idea of America
By: Rajini Srikanth.
Series: Asian American history and culture
Publisher: Temple University Press
Published: 2004
Place of publication: Philadelphia
Language: eng
Number of pages: 296
Subjects: American literature -- South Asian American authors -- History and criticism.; Canadian literature -- South Asian authors -- History and criticism.; South Asians -- Canada -- Intellectual life.; South Asian Americans -- Intellectual life.; Emigration and immigration in literature.; South Asians in literature.; Immigrants in literature.; Minorities in literature.; North America -- Intellectual life.; America -- In literature.
Description: "This book grows out of the question, "What is South Asian American writing and what insights can it offer us about living in the world at this particular moment of tense geopolitics and inter-linked economies?" South Asian American literature, with its focus on the multiple geographies and histories of the global dispersal of South Asians, pulls back from a close-up view of the United States to reveal a wider landscape of many nations and peoples. Drawing on the cosmopolitan sensibility of scholars like Anthony Appiah, Vinay Dharwadker, Martha Nussbaum, Bruce Robbins, and Amartya Sen, this book argues that to read the body of South Asian American literature justly, one must engage with the urgencies of places as diverse as Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, Burma, Pakistan, and Trinidad. Poets, novelists, and playwrights like Indran Amirthanayagam, Meena Alexander, Amitav Ghosh, Michael Ondaatje, Shani Mootoo, Amitava Kumar, Tahira Naqvi, and Sharbari Ahmed exhort North American residents to envision connectedness with inhabitants of other lands. These writers' significant contribution to American literature and to the American imagination is to depict the nation as simultaneously discrete and entwined within the fold of other nations. The world out there arrives next door."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 277-287) and index.