asianamlitfans | Oct. 11th, 2007

For the class this evening, we discussed Rajini Srikanth's The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America.

It's really quite a pleasurable read, and very accessible for people not versed in literary criticism or the body of literature she discusses. The overall argument is that South Asian American literature offers a particularly useful body of texts for readers to imagine the interconnectedness of the world's nations, to critique American exceptionalism, and otherwise to challenge the usual, stale representations of South Asians and South Asian Americans available. I like that Srikanth gives a pretty nice discussion of cosmopolitanism, suggesting the idea of living in the world and paying attention to the differences that abound rather than trying to fit everyone into discrete categories or binaries. Despite this turn to a global awareness, Srikanth is still pretty tradtional as an Asian Americanist insistent on anti-Orientalist critique and the importance of nuanced (more fully human) representations of Asian Americans rather than stereotypical ones. Her approach is to summarize and provide brief readings of a wide range of texts to demonstrate the kind of reading strategy that she advances. She doesn't spend much time focusing on the formal qualities of the texts, though, interested as she is mainly in the social and political implications of various representations.

After the introductory chapter, Srikanth discusses how South Asian American writers dwell on a variety of locations -- not just South Asian and the United States -- as a way of claiming a broader conception of belonging and cultural identity. The next chapter takes up alternative representations of desire, gender, and sexuality to the stereotypical ones of the abusive South Asian man dominating his submissive wife. Here, Srikanth privileges non-normative sexualities in discussing, for example, Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night, one of my favorite novels. The fourth chapter I found to be particularly interesting because Srikanth takes up the issue of writers representing people different from themselves -- the question of how a South Asian American writer can write Italian American characters, for example. She mostly points out the need to examine power dynamics in the social relations of groups involved in cross-cultural, cross-gender, cross-sexuality representations, noting that for a white male American to write Vietnamese characters comes across as appropriation of voice (as in Robert Olen Butler's work, harshly critiqued by Monique Truong). And the final chapter returns to the idea of America, noting how South Asian American writing takes up trust and betrayal in negotiating the American space (socially, culturally, politically, and so on).