Salzburg Global Fellow Iwona Filipczak analyzes the different phases of how South Asian American literature has evolved
This article was written by Salzburg Global Fellow Iwona Filipczak, who attended the Salzburg Global American Studies program on “Crossing the Pacific: The Asian American Experience in U.S. Society and Discourse” in September 2024.
South Asian American literature became a distinct field of Asian American literature in the 1990s. In this way, South Asian Americans (SAA) achieved a greater visibility within Asian American studies, created an adequate representation of the quickly growing population, and marked their distinction from other Asian Americans.
South Asian American literary self-representation or the construction of their identities is closely connected with the socio-cultural position of the whole group in American society. This is informed by their perception of radical otherness, and has been gradually influenced by their sense of achievement and rising social status. When the Immigration Act of 1965 opened the U.S. to nations from territories largely absent from the U.S. diversity, the new wave of highly skilled and well-educated immigrants which started to arrive was also racially diverse (largely from Asia, Caribbean Basin, and South America). Their cultural differences in customs, food, clothes, as well as skin color induced American fears and hostility. These negative attitudes led to racial profiling and violent acts against South Asians from the 1970s to 1990s (“Dotbusters” in New Jersey), and also after the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, as many SAA were mistaken for Arabs.
The situation is changing, at present, as SAA are increasingly identified as a model minority due to their industriousness, academic excellency, and general cultural and economic success. Their political visibility should be mentioned, as the first “Asian American” Vice President, Kamala Harris, is actually the first South Asian American in this prominent position and the Democratic presidential nominee in the 2024 election.
Considering the changing socio-cultural position of South Asian Americans, their writing can be explored in three distinct phases: assimilationist phase, the phase of cultural in-betweenness (hybridity), and finally, the transnational phase. These phases follow one another, but at the same time, they overlap and give evidence to the cultural complexity of the group diversity, which comprises the countries of India, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Maldives, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.
Bharati Mukherjee may be hailed as the representative of the assimilationist phase. Mukherjee had a particular agenda for her fiction – she wished to demonstrate South Asian immigrants’ potential of integration into American society, as well as their willingness and possibility of assimilation. Her most famous heroine, Jasmine, fits into the powerful theme of the American Dream and opportunity. She is a figure of a robust immigrant who wants to discard the past and become an American. Mukherjee tries to pave the way for the new arrivals (post-1965 immigration), so she shows them as strong, potent, and thus productive for the new country; at the same time, she draws analogies between South Asians and minorities previously thought as “unassimilable”, namely, Italians, Greeks, or Jews, who eventually were successfully incorporated by the American mainstream (e.g. essay “Immigrant Writing: Changing the Contours of a National Literature”, short story “Orbiting"). Mukherjee’s advocacy for assimilation, although criticized by other writers and scholars, was an important move and helped to establish South Asian American literature, while Mukherjee’s novel “Jasmine” was the first to enter its canon.
Mukherjee’s writing was programmatic, while her peers as well as later generations have showed SAA identity as a constant negotiation between the homeland culture and Americanness. Exploration of the state of cultural in-betweenness is an expression of how they make sense of their negotiations of identity, how they are torn between the feeling of belonging and unbelonging (e.g., the problem of Indian immigrants’ children, who are called ABCDs – American Born Confused Desis - is prominent in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Namesake”), how they struggle with prejudice and hostility (e.g., Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni “The Mistress of Spices”), hatred or racially motivated violence (e.g., Ch. B. Divakaruni “Queen of Dreams”, Sheila Abdullah’s “Saffron Dreams”). Another problem which contributes to the feeling of otherness is the promotion and marketing of SAA literature as “exotica” (increasing global sales by conscious exoticization of book covers), which contributes to the group’s sense of “otherness” and exclusion.
At present, more and more writers are eager to explore expanded, transnational sensibilities, through the exploration of their ancestral countries, depiction of multinational (often diasporic, as in the case of India) connections, and increased mobility between countries. In this way, they portray the complexity of lives and identities, various cultural and national entanglements, which preclude maintaining a nation within the borders of one state only (e.g., Jhumpa Lahiri’s “The Lowland”, Abraham Verghese’s “Cutting for Stone” and “The Covenant of Water” ).
Iwona Filipczak works in the Institute of Modern Languages at the University of Zielona Góra, Poland, where she teaches courses on literature, in particular American literature, and diploma seminars. Her research interests are focused on the questions of globalization, diasporic experience, identity, cross-cultural encounters, illness in South Asian American fiction, particularly Indian-American.
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