Cultural Studies

Chair: Daniel Y. Kim
Committee Members: Kandice Chuh, Sunaina Maira

Winner:

The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America by Rajini Srikanth

While the committee was impressed by the sheer number of excellent works published in this field during 2004, our unanimous choice for the book award in cultural studies was Rajini Srikanth's The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America. A groundbreaking study of the literature of South Asian America, The World Next Door makes a powerful argument for the political and ethical value of humane reading practices in a political climate that discourages any but the most impoverished understandings of the relationship of the United States to the rest of the world. Rather than reiterating well-worn debates within Asian American Studies, this book simply goes about the business of showing how South Asian American literary works "supply the narratives and images that are compelling enough to make readers in the United States aware of the gaps in their consciousness, and intriguing enough to move them to fill these gaps by reading with care and living with vision." Where these texts attempt to move readers, as Srikanth elegantly demonstrates throughout, is toward a desire to understand the socio-historical contexts that shape their complexities—contexts that range across the diaspora and to South Asia, and that are shaped by forces both national and global. The "wider landscape of other nations and other peoples" that these texts make visible and the "enlargement of perspective" they help to engender are of particularly urgent moral value, as Srikanth makes plain, in a period marked by heightened militarism abroad and the erosion of civil liberties at home. While The World Next Door keeps its readers ever mindful of political contexts in which each of the literary texts she examines is embedded, the readings themselves are graceful, lucid, eminently accessible and, indeed, often quite moving. The aesthetic and emotional power of each literary work is effectively conveyed as is its ethical complexity. In treating each text and author with such care, Srikanth communicates the pleasure that the act of reading literature affords while always making clear that such pleasure is never innocent of politics.

But, The World Next Door is commendable not only for how it reads but also for what it reads. For this is a pioneering study of South Asian American literature that is the first to bring together the work of such authors as: Meena Alexander, Agha Shahid Ali, Amitav Ghosh, Ginu Kamani, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Tahira Naqvi, Michael Ondaatje, Shyam Selvadurai, Abraham Verghese. Rather than demonstrating how each writer's work relates back to a single paradigm, Srikanth emphasizes the multiplicity of political concerns treated by this tradition: the variety of intensely felt forms of political affiliation apparent in writers across the diaspora; how South Asian American representations of desire, gender and sexuality require an interpretive framework that does not assume the modern West as a norm or as its central site of struggle; the ethics of representation as they relate to South Asian American authors who write about "what they are not"; the contradictions and tensions that define South Asian American literary attempts to criticize and rework ideologies of American exceptionalism. We are confident that this work will quickly become indispensable to the study and teaching of South Asian American literature and culture.

The World Next Door is an eminently interdisciplinary project and its well-crafted literary analyses always emerge through a careful consideration of historical context. But what is indeed quite distinctive about this work are the specific claims it makes about the place of literary analysis within an interdisciplinary Asian American Studies—about, in particular, the ethics of interpretation. As Srikanth asserts, reading this literature must be "a just act—doing justice to the contexts from which the writing emerges and challenging one's imagination to encounter the texts with courage, humility, and daring."