Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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From National to Transnational: Three Generations of South Asian American Women Writers
Get PDFThis article examines a representative sampling of canonical South Asian American texts –Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989), selections from Chitra Divakaruni’s short story collection Arranged Marriage (1986), and two short stories – “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine†and “Mrs. Sen’s†– from Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies (2000). Although all three authors are increasingly taught within American classrooms, the pedagogical approach to their texts is often framed by binary oppositions that privilege a modern America over a traditional India. By viewing these localised US texts from a transnational perspective, my article disrupts their pre-occupation with an idealised American national identity. As my reading illustrates, it is imperative to foreground the transnational elements in these writers inorder to show how each of their narratives can be read as counter to the hegemony of the overtly national paradigm it appears to uphold.Â
Writing for Asian Children: History, Fantasy and Identity
Get PDFA short autobiographical essay on the motivations and contexts for the writing of the children’s novel, Princess Shawl (2008). The essay also explicates its narrative structure and explores the relation of history to specific novelistic strategies
Canons and Questions of Value in Literature in English from the Malayan Peninsula
Get PDFThe paper is divided into two parts. The first provides an overview of the role played by anthologies and critical writing in the formation of regional canons of writing in English. The survey draws inferences about the role played by poets, critics, and academics in local canon-formation, as well the role played by Western education and literary models in the formation of a regional tradition. The second part stands back from the historical specificity of regional canons to take a more conceptual approach to questions of value in literary cultures. What are the criteria by which we judge literary productions? In what ways do such criteria bespeak the specific cultural conditions within which they are exercised, and in what ways can they be said to transcend such specificity? What are the connections between canons of the local and regional kind and those that aspire to universal status? What, in short, might we recognise about the dynamics of the cultural politics that underlies all canon-formations? The paper will conclude by bringing together the two strands of inquiry with some general observations on the contemporary situation of the literary cultures in English of the Malayan peninsula. Â
