“Third World Woman,” Family, and Marriage: South Asian Diasporic Fiction as a Site for Consolidation of the American Nation-state

Abstract

Reviewing four popular works of fiction—Samina Ali's Madras on Rainy Days, Chitra Bannerji Divakaruni's Arranged Marriage, Tanuja Desai Hidier's Born Confused, and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake—I ask the following two questions: What are the meanings of South Asian-American identities in the racial and ethnic imaginary of the U.S.? And, how do these meanings travel through class, gender, sexual, and cultural hierarchies in the U.S. as well as transnationally? Probing the cultural experiences dispersed among fictional narratives and comparing them with situations formulated in my own ethnographic work, I find the identity formations in the fictions to be untenable. What is being written is a story of cultural displacement, which evades the specificity of gender and depends on stereotypic propositions about America and South Asia.