Teaching South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Literature
- Editors: Nalini Iyer, Pallavi Rastogi
- Pages: 320
- Published: 2024
- ISBN: 9781603296380 (Paperback)
- ISBN: 9781603296373 (Hardcover)
Migration from the Indian subcontinent began on a large scale over 150 years ago, and today there are diasporic communities around the world. The identities of South Asians in the diaspora are informed by roots in the subcontinent and the complex experiences of race, religion, nation, class, caste, gender, sexuality, language, trauma, and geography. The literature that arises from these roots and experiences is diverse, powerful, and urgent.
Teaching South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Literature embraces an intersectionality that attends to the historical and material conditions of cultural production, the institutional contexts of pedagogy, and the subject positions of teachers and students. Encouraging a deep engagement with works whose personal, political, and cultural insights are specific to South Asian diasporic consciousness, the volume also provokes meaningful reflection on other literatures in an age of increasing migration and diaspora.
Acknowledgments (xi)
Part I: Introduction: Histories and Contexts
Toward a Pedagogy of South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Literature (3)
South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Writing: Histories and Geographies of Dispersion (23)
Part II: East Meets South: Africa and the Caribbean
M. G. Vassanji’s Fiction in a Transnational, Postcolonial, and Social Justice Context (41)
Indianness in the Caribbean: Strategies for Teaching Indo-Caribbean Anglophone Literature (51)
Faulty Stereotypes: Indo-Caribbean Literature and a Pedagogy of Social Justice (62)
History, Historiography, Ethnography, and Diaspora in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (71)
Goa on the Literary Atlas: Questioning Belonging (79)
Part III: East Meets West: Post–World War II Britain
We Are Not All Migrants: Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West and Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways (93)
Cosmopolitanism and Crisis in South Asian Anglophone Diasporic Novels (103)
Teaching the Cousinship of Experience: The Postcolonial Bildungsroman across Time and Cultures (113)
Part IV: East Meets North: The United States and Canada
Remembering as Learning: South Asian Histories in a Canadian Classroom (123)
“Watch Me Reposition” Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (133)
Race, Citizenship, and Community Formation in Bhira Backhaus’s Under the Lemon Trees and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (142)
Teaching Nepali Anglophone Diasporic Literature (152)
Part V: East Meets North: The Sri Lankan Refugee Diaspora
Reimagining the Refugee Crisis through Sharon Bala’s The Boat People (165)
Teaching Sri Lankan American Literature in the American South (174)
Navigating the Homeland/Hostland Dynamic: Sri Lankan Diasporic Literature (185)
Teaching Sri Lanka in the United States: Human Rights in the Literary and Visual Imaginations (194)
Part VI: East Meets North: The Pakistani American Diaspora after 9/11
Teaching Pakistani Anglophone Diasporic Literature (207)
Recontextualizing the Global Diaspora: Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West at a Hispanic-Serving Institution (216)
Resisting Racialization: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist in Ethnic Studies Courses (225)
Pakistani Anglophone Diasporic Literature in Writing-Intensive Seminars (234)
Part VII: The Forms of Diaspora: Nonfiction, Film, Television, Digital and Creative Writing
Teaching Memoirs: Nonfiction as Public Discourse in South Asian Diasporas (247)
Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement, Close Reading, and Moments of Recognition (258)
Joke’s on Us: Indian Americans, Comedy, and Writing America (267)
Extimate Pedagogies, Intimate Texts: Teaching Digital South Asian Diasporas (277)
“A Temporary Matter”: Jhumpa Lahiri and Creative Writing Pedagogy (287)
Recovering the Gendered Violence and Trauma of Partition in the Me Too Era (294)
Notes on Contributors (303)
