How to Be South Asian in America: Narratives of Ambivalence and Belonging

3. “Stretched over Dark Femaleness”: Three South Asian Novels of Americanization

3 / “Stretched over Dark Femaleness”: Three South Asian Novels of Americanization The first chapter of this book laid the foundation for analyzing distinct sets of South Asian stories and the second chapter moved from the theoretical to the empirical, highlighting how narratives of assimilation are always in dialogue with one another across local and global contexts. This third chapter complements “official,” socio-historical, and ethnographic accounts of diasporization and Americanization by concentrating on published fictions—Meena Alexander’s Manhattan Music, Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife and Jasmine, and Bapsi Sidhwa’s An American Brat1 —which are centrally concerned with contradictory imperatives and choices surrounding assimilation. By treating varied representations of Americanization as related texts, I continue to emphasize that imaginative and lived experiences are equally important for shaping what Arjun Appadurai has called “ethnoscapes” (48), which can be understood as possibilities for community belonging which contemporary (trans)national individuals must navigate. The published fictions also offer opportunities for examining issues that might have been more muted or less relevant in the other cases, while also reminding us—in the contrast with the other sets of stories—what these novels leave out. For instance, although the influence of gender was not directly or conspicuously emphasized in my chapter about Indo-Guyanese Americans in Schenectady, it is integral to the narratives discussed in this chapter . Conversely, questions of economic uplift that were so pervasive in GuyaneseOpportunities were relatively deprioritized in these novels. These related sets of stories from ethnography and literature are truly “stretched over dark femaleness” / 133 complementary in understanding Americanization as a multifarious, unpredictable process reflecting universal themes with infinite iterations —as with any good story. As part of my overall strategy of adopting a methodology that is responsive to the texts in question rather than rigidly formulaic, the narratives in this chapter are analyzed in separate sections rather than being discussed collectively and arranged by topic, as in other chapters. There are several reasons for this, including each author’s distinctive oeuvre, which has resulted in a body of texts that are useful for framing the particular novel(s) by an author which I discuss in this chapter. This organization allows me to contextualize each Americanization narrative within a history of the author’s literary engagements and critical responses to the writing. Also, these texts are overtly bounded since they are published as books, which is not true of the ethnographies I collected or of the visual medium of film, which leads me to offer more precisely demarcated analyses in this chapter. Finally, my discussion in each chapter has been uniquely shaped based on what I consider to be the most informative discourses of belonging for illuminating that set of texts. In this case, after offering a reading of gendered and hybridized bodies, which are major shared tropes in the novels, I then discuss the authors’ very different projects concerning South Asian American women’s assimilation. Indeed, the selected novels represent some of the most focused literary examinations of South Asian assimilation at the turn of the twenty-first century, although scholars have not tended to read them in relation to one another as creative depictions of tropes of Americanization.2 In these particular novels that are part of the bildungsroman tradition in English, the narrative focus is an individual’s interpretation of her relationship to her current nation and to processes of diasporization. Although the bildungsroman was initially associated with German national identity, scholars have traced subsequent traditions in other European, British, American, and postcolonial3 literatures. Some critics in the United States argue for the continued relevance of a genre that other postmodern critiques relegate to a bygone age in which selfhood was understood in more static, Enlightenment terms. The bildungsroman pattern of narrating the education of national citizens currently seems to be reflected most often in writing by women and multiethnic Americans.4 With a focus on Asian American literature, Patricia P. Chu explains that novels such as these share the central focus of the traditional bildungsroman, “which socializes readers by inviting them to identify with protagonists 134 / “stretched over dark femaleness” as they strive to become good citizens of their nation” (12). Mukherjee, Sidhwa, and Alexander take their place in this tradition through their narratives of “becoming American.” They expose how immigration can result in the disruption of familiar metanarratives of multiple nations, implicating family, community, ethnicity, and gendered identities. For the conventions of a...