The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America (review)

In The World Next Door, Rajini Srikanth has kneaded together two different kinds of study. Not content to survey and describe an emerging literature, the author has folded readings of mostly fresh, mostly undiscussed South Asian North American texts into a sustained five-part essay on the roles of writers, readers, scholars, and activists in the current political situation. For her, this new literature requires readers to reconsider their reading habits and to reflect on the habits of Americans in "reading" their nation and others' as texts; such scrutiny is most urgent in the wake of U.S. government responses to the events of September 11. Thus, she engages with debates about the profiling of Muslims, Arabs, and others portrayed as terrorism suspects and about ideas of America and its place in the world. In Asian American studies, she responds to debates about the relative merits of demanding social justice for Asian Americans in the U.S. vs. the task of understanding Asian Americans as global citizens negotiating with racial projections emerging from the nation's rise as a global power. The book does introduce contemporary South Asian cultural texts, but it's not organized around these texts so much as issues raised in reading them. The author questions most of the assumptions that have framed Asian American literary studies, leaving readers with new questions to explore and define this changing terrain. Bibliophiles will rejoice in the dozens of titles, including fiction, poetry, performance art, and plays that Srikanth discusses, including underrepresented Muslim voices. For scholars of Asian American culture "East of California," Srikanth resituates South Asian literature with neither a center nor a margin, but a global web of diasporic communities that touch such places as India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Trinidad, Canada, Tennessee, and Massachusetts. Finally, for scholars of American culture and womens' studies, Srikanth's book proposes broad questions useful for considering American culture as the U.S. attempts to redefine its role abroad.

After explaining her use of the contingent categories, "South Asian American writing" and "North America," Srikanth shifts focus from single sites to the "interconnectedness among nations and peoples," and the interaction between acts of literary writing and reading and transforming the realms of "politics and civic behavior." Quickly sketching the emergence of American awareness of India and the emergence of South Asian America literary texts, Srikanth establishes that her primary focus will be on texts published after Salman Rushdie's watershed novel Midnight's Children (1980). Inveighing against "partial" (biased, incomplete) readings, the author offers two suggestions for "just" readings: a caution against bipolar thinking, and a demand to read "as foreigners to the text," acknowledging our limited knowledge of other cultures. Srikanth cites Bapsi Sidhwa, Tony Kushner, Michael Ondaatje, and Arundhati Roy as writers who explore and appreciate the defining traumas of other nations, a task she feels Americans must undertake if we seek other nations' support. For Srikanth, the prevailing "idea of America" is based on John Winthrop's view, in 1630, of the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a "city on the hill" for the world to emulate; she quotes his words as definitive of the future nation's self-image as uniquely favored by God, driven by the desire for religious freedom, equality, and democratic values rather than mere material prosperity, and therefore justified in such acts as massacring "four hundred Pequots during the Pequot War of 1637" (35). Economic motives are typically muted by such ideologues, but, through Benjamin Franklin, are recast as the secular business values of "reason, industry, . . . an eye for the practical," and personal and national self-sufficiency (35), setting the stage for U.S. exceptionalism in the twenty-first century. Srikanth then contrasts this image of America's uniqueness with the complex webs of connection in Amitav Ghosh's memoir/history/novel, In an Antique Land, which links twelfth- and twentieth-century exchanges between Egypt and India with Iraq's 1990 invasion of...