Writing New Identities: South Asian Women, North America and Three Asian-American Novels
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Traditionally, communities have been based on markers such as ethnicity and religion – which proffer recognisable homogeneity. But in today’s rapidly changing world hybrid identities such as the ethnically South Asian American citizens who are the protagonists of the novels I am looking at – Hindi-Bindi Club, Queen of Dreams and Desirable Daughters – are increasingly common. At first sight, these novels appear to celebrate the kind of chaotic plurality that is the much-eulogised face of the modern world, or in the case of my particular inquiry, of changing America. However, the common question that each of the characters in these novels – the creations of authors who have themselves charted versions of the same trajectory – faces routinely, is ‘Where are you from?’ They are still ‘visible’ – potentially ‘out of place’, suggesting links between place and identity that the discourse of ‘routes not roots’ has failed to erase. This disconnect between claiming belonging, and external acceptance of that affiliation in that space takes on literally life-threatening dimensions at moments of crisis – in two of the novels, the aftermath of 9/11, and in another, terrorist bombings. Yet even as their beliefs about ‘belonging’ are shaken, the characters continue to identify as ‘American.’ Simultaneously, their coping stratagems both reference and reject visions of ‘Indianness’. So who are these people, and where are their identities located? Where do their selves belong, and who are their ‘Others’? My chapter proposes to follow the protagonists through their differing journeys in an attempt to fashion some conclusions as to the ‘new’ nature of identities, and whether it is in the end possible to ‘belong’ in spaces that one chose rather than inherited.