Between History and Identity: Reading the Authentic in South Asian Diasporic Literature and Community.

Abstract

Combining textual analysis, literary reception history, and qualitative sociological research, this study of a contemporary South Asian American book club historicizes and analyzes the various taste-making, ideological effects that multiple literary publics have on one another. Even as it documents how South Asian American readers strategically approach South Asian diasporic literature that purportedly mirrors their own cultural and diasporic experiences, this dissertation is a critical examination of the politics of self-recognition in an immigrant community, which oscillate between self-Orientalization and refutations of ethnic authenticity. Book club participants use South Asian diasporic literature to challenge and assert essentialized notions of gender, class and sexuality for wide-ranging yet contradictory purposes: to mobilize positive and negative stereotypes stemming from the model minority myth, to understand their transnational social and political positions, and to construct notions of South Asian femininity and masculinity in the diaspora. However, in contrast with most ethnographies of reading that survey the uses of literature within a group or community and that presume the strict separation of academic critics from lay readers, the ethnographic, interpretive methodology that I employ compels a critical, creative dialogue between these readerships. Taking a cue from lay readers' praxis in which desire plays a paramount role, I study the analogously contradictory effects of readerly desire in literary academia that lead critics of South Asian diasporic literatures to reinscribe the gendered hegemonies of mainstream canons. In their efforts to diversify the literary histories presented in the multicultural university classroom, critics of South Asian diasporic literatures reproduce structures of knowledge and disciplinary regimes wherein the “public,” historical sphere is male-dominated, while the “private,” identitarian realm is feminized. Employing an interdisciplinary methodology, I contextualize and historicize lay and academic critical readings of popular South Asian diasporic literature in order to examine the encounters between essentialized and constructed notions of identity and between representation and interpretation in both of these reading communities. In so doing, this dissertation considers simultaneously the instability of the representing and represented subject and the vitality of lived experience.