Hybrid Bildungs in South Asian women's writing: Meena Alexander, Bharati Mukherjee, and Bapsi Sidhwa re-imagine America

This dissertation argues that South Asian American women are producing Bildungsromane---novels of formation---that rewrite conventional narratives of America. Bringing innovation to the traditional literary genre, Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine, Bapsi Sidhwa's An American Brat, and Meena Alexander's Manhattan Music offer progressive visions of the nation. They expose how the concept "We the People" needs to be constantly reassessed and forcefully reshaped in order to embody the actual diversity of the nation. Analyzing self-development and nation-building in these Bildungsromane, I discuss them as hybrid novels which represent the multicultural and multiethnic characteristics of the United States.; Read together, these novels reveal how immigrant woman in the U.S. continue to reshape the iconography of the country even as they refashion themselves. These Bildungsromane confront the limitations of familiar "American dreams." They also envision processes by which a character can accommodate herself to the dislocation of migration in order to achieve a new sense of belonging. I address the interplay of dislocation and belonging through postcolonial and feminist perspectives which focus on cultural "in-betweenness." By elaborating such theories, I conclude that the formation of a protagonist and the formation of the nation are mutually influential. Furthermore, both are simultaneously re-imagined in these narratives of immigration.; In the prologue, I contextualize the writers within the developing field of South Asian American Studies and identify patterns of South Asian immigration to the U.S. Chapter One describes the Bildungsroman and its literary histories with special attention to how race and gender analyses have significantly modified the genre's initial premises. In Chapters Two to Four, I introduce multiple novels by each author but focus on tracing the distinct patterns of "becoming American" in specific texts. Their models of "Americanization" provide a variety of possibilities for understanding migration, subjectivity, gender and race positionality, and political accountability. These models include images of "successful" immigrants as: aggressive individualists and iconoclasts refusing ethnic labels; chronic border-crossers who balance autonomy and privacy within community; and politically-motivated individuals who collectively re-imagine the nation through action and attitude.