Contemporary Diasporic South Asian Women's Fiction: Gender, Narration and Globalisation

This book is the first comparative analysis of a new generation of diasporic Anglophone South Asian women novelists including Kiran Desai, Tahmima Anam, Monica Ali, Kamila Shamsie and Jhumpa Lahiri from a feminist perspective. It charts the significant changes these writers have produced in postcolonial and contemporary women s fiction since the late 1990s. Paying careful attention to the authors distinct subcontinental backgrounds of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka as well as India - this study destabilises the central place given to fiction focused on India. It broadens the customary focus on diasporic writers metropolitan contexts, illuminates how these transnational, female-authored literary texts challenge national assumptions and considers the ways in which this new configuration of transnational, feminist writers produces a postcolonial feminist discourse, which differs from Anglo-American feminism.
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Acknowledgements.- Introduction.- 1. Globalisation, labour, narrative and representation in Arundhati Roy, Monica Ali and Kiran Desai.- 2. War, violence and memory: gendered national imaginaries in Tahmima Anam, Sorayya Khan and contemporary Sri Lankan women writers.- 3. Resistance and religion: gender, Islam and agency in Kamila Shamsie, Tahmima Anam, Monica Ali and Ameena Hussein.- 4. Migration, gender and globalisation in Jhumpa Lahiri.- 5. Women writing postcolonial cities: Jhumpa Lahiri, Kamila Shamsie and Tahmima Anam.- Afterword.- Bibliography.- Index.-