Resisting women: Orientalism, diaspora, and gender

This project traces the ways in which five South Asian women writers of fiction in North America contest orientalist stereotypes about South Asia and South Asian women in their literary texts and interviews. I study the resistance of Anita Rau Badami, Rachna Mara, Kirin Narayan, Bharati Mukherjee, and Sara Suleri in terms of their struggles for legitimacy, which lead them to engage with ideologies of diaspora, nationalism and patriarchy. My approach to the texts I study is materialist feminist ideology critique because I read these women's rebuttals to orientalism as historical and constructed rather than essentialist. My project asks, what are the subversions of orientalism in these women's fiction given the context in which they write and the politics of their reception in North America? Their resistance to dominant orientalist ideology is important because even though culture shapes the subject, the subject also shapes culture. Thus, the texts I discuss construct meaning and create culture that is resistant and oppositional but not hegemonic.; First, I use the theories of Pierre Bourdieu to explain the packaging of South Asian women's novels as a result of the orientalism of our culture, which insures that exotic book covers sell more books and lead to popular legitimacy for the author (chapter one). Then, I compare the works of two writers to determine the relationship between popular legitimacy and textual resistance to orientalism (chapter two). Next, I read a novel that subverts the notion that authentic identities actually exist in order to argue that contradictory identities should be used for political change in the diaspora rather than strategic essentialism (chapter three). In order to discover the effects of nationalism on orientalist ideologies, I examine the books of an author who has lived in India, Canada, and the U.S. with the result that her response to each country's myths either adds to or diminishes her attempts to resist orientalism (chapter four). And finally, I discuss a memoir that fights orientalism by critiquing all categories including "woman" and "third world" while simultaneously creating a relational subjectivity at the intersections of the categories it rejects (chapter five).