A geography of strangenesstranscultural personhood and fractal identity in contemporary South Asian Muslim American Literature

Resumen

A modern definition of cultural identity must include not only personal biographical aspects but also the diversity, stresses, and tensions of life in late modernity. It should help make sense of the individual’s present not uniquely in terms of their past. Still, it should also offer a mechanism to explain that individual’s links with the unfamiliar environment in a comprehensive manner. Further, such a conceptualization of identity should be composed of multiple components, constantly evolving and reflecting the pluralistic realities of today’s culturally diverse and globalized world. Theorizations of cross-cultural, multicultural, and intercultural identity need to be replaced with conceptualizations of transcultural identity to better reflect the lived and imagined realities of global diasporas, which are becoming increasingly transcultural and transnational. With the changing role of nation-state and nationhood in the twenty-first century, identity can no longer be linked to a specific geographical space. Instead, the question of multiple simultaneous homelands makes any discussion of identity complex and complicated. In this regard, the mathematical concept of fractality has interesting applications in forming plural social identities and explaining the cultural complexity and multiplicity of “being” and “becoming” in diverse societies such as the United States. This dissertation carries out an epistemic inquiry of identity in South Asian Muslim American literature published in the twenty-first century. The selection of works analyzed includes five novels, two poetry collections, one memoir, and one collection of short stories, representing different narrative forms and styles by eight South Asian Muslim American writers. The authors have been selected for their work on the themes of displacement, identity, intergenerational conflict, gender, and religion, to highlight the transcultural nature of the literary works and present the fractal nature of the identity of literary characters and their discursive imaginations. The chosen literary publications examine a range of identity theory concepts coupled with the material and philosophical realities of the late modern world such as globalization, digital transformation, time-space compression, structuration, and reflexivity. Each author’s work is analyzed for the South Asian Muslim American diaspora’s response to the transformations, contradictions, and challenges confronting contemporary Islam as it moves forward in the twenty-first century. Far from normalizing the identity of these diasporic individuals, the focus of this dissertation is to present them as complex adaptive beings possessing and exhibiting fractal identities. Furthermore, by incorporating facets of the Muslim American identity and Islamic identity, which have their unique idiosyncrasies, worldviews, and cultural practices, this study attempts to present a more holistic view of contemporary South Asian Muslim Americans and their fiction. Therefore, the core of this project centers around the effects of displacement on identity formation moving towards an existential model of fractal identities in these transcultural diasporic individuals across generations, genders, and religion, highlighting sociologically and politically relevant themes.