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.
Table of Content
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.-
About the author
Ruvani Ranasinha is a Reader in Postcolonial Literatures in the Department of English, King s College London
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