Dialogues in the diaspora: Muslim Bangladeshi-American women and culturally relevant literature

This study explores how Muslim Bangladeshi-American women (MBAW) respond to popularized South Asian diaspora literature (SADL). The second-generation children of South Asian immigrants often struggle with their bicultural identity. Young girls, specifically, deal with binary constructs associated with gender, religious and cultural norms (Purkayastha, 2005). Some second-generation children began to write these ideas in fiction and non-fiction forms for publication. Subsequently in the 1990s, SADL entered the U.S. mainstream with several texts awarded prestigious recognition, such as the Pulitzer and Booker Prizes.;This study explores how the rise of SADL may serve as an educative and reflective vehicle for MBAW to negotiate understandings about their biculturalism. This research inquiry enters through a postcolonial feminist framework to analyze the ways MBAW create hybrid identities (Bhabha, 1994) to resist the Orientalist (Said, 1994) dichotomies between East and West and tradition and modernity. This qualitative study draws out specific themes through a case study methodology. The purposefully selected sample is composed of five women, from similar communities, who participated in two individual interviews each and one focus group. The data were coded and organized according to the research questions and the analysis and interpretation of findings were organized by way of three analytic categories based on the study's conceptual framework: (a) experiences with bicultural identity, (b) identification with literature in their high school English classrooms, (c) perceptions of current SADL. This methodology, incorporating individual storytelling and collaborative dialogue (Minh ha, 1989), fosters not only an important mode of qualitative inquiry, but encourages the role of female coalitions (Mohanty, 2003) and book groups in South Asian communities, and more broadly Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1997) through the integration of diaspora literature.;My research revealed that all women in the study struggled with their bicultural identity at various points throughout their high school experience and beyond. Most participants responded that they had not read any SADL until they were in college or older, but when they did, they identified greatly with it. The implications of my study are that certain SADL could offer support to South Asian women and students currently struggling with their bicultural identity.