A Geography of Strangeness: Transcultural Personhood and Fractal Identity in Contemporary South Asian Muslim American Literature

UNIVERSIDAD DE VALLADOLID FACULTAD DE FILOSOFÍA Y LETRAS DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA TESIS DOCTORAL A Geography of Strangeness Transcultural Personhood and Fractal Identity in Contemporary South Asian Muslim American Literature Presentada por Muqarram Khorakiwala para optar al grado de doctor por la Universidad de Valladolid Dirigida por Dr. Jesús Benito Sánchez Valladolid, 2022 This page intentionally left blank Dedication In memory of my nanima Salma my dadima Batul two exceptional women ahead of their times who lived exemplary lives perfectly balancing tradition and modernity Acknowledgments This project has been in the making for fifteen years, and while I begin to think about everyone who has helped, supported, guided, inspired, advised, and counseled me throughout this journey, inspired by Syed M. Masood’s idea, a verse from Chapter 55 (Ar-Raḥmān / The Merciful) of the Holy Quran, repeated thirty-one times, comes to my mind – “Which of your Lord’s blessings do you deny?” The verse is apt in the context of this literary dissertation as the chapter of ArRaḥmān is composed entirely in rhymed prose typical of classical Arabic poetry, each layer recursively revealing a different and fascinating nature of our fractal lives in the contemporary era. While it is impossible to acknowledge every single person who has led me to this point, they have all been nothing but a true blessing. Some of the people I would like to thank are mentioned below. My profound gratitude to Dr. Jesús Benito, my supervisor, for taking an active interest in my work and patiently guiding me through the research process. Our paths crossed again in 2019, ten years later, after I completed my Masters at the Universidad de Valladolid, but it feels as though the connection was always there, and he made it so easy to pick up where I left. Without his encouragement and support, this dissertation would not have been possible. For bringing me to Ireland, I would like to express my gratitude to Fiona O’Toole. For his generosity and support, I wish to thank the Cork-based writer and documentarian, Cónal Creedon, who kindly introduced me to Professor Lee Jenkins at University College Cork. My project has benefitted from the support provided by Professor Jenkins, in the first year of the Ph.D. program, which helped me build a solid foundation. Professor Jenkins also introduced me to Dr. Melanie Otto at Trinity College Dublin, who provided insightful feedback on my final dissertation. My sincere gratitude also to Dr. Carmen Zamorano Llena from Dalarna University, who shared her expertise in transcultural studies, provided pertinent comments that have helped me solidify my arguments in the current dissertation and will help me in my future research. I also thank Dr. Sascha Pöhlmann from the American Literary History department at Ludwig-MaximilianUniversity, whose feedback has opened a whole new way of thinking about American Studies. My project has also benefitted from the several research courses, seminars, and conferences that I have participated and presented in over the last three years, particularly: the postgraduate symposiums held by the Irish Association for American Studies; Bookends, the postgraduate conferences held at University College Cork; the Early Career Scholars conferences organized by Universidad de Valladolid and Universidad de Salamanca; and the conferences chaired by the London Center for Interdisciplinary Research on the topics of Borders and Borderlands, International Migration, Spatiality and Temporality. Thank you also to the Editorial Committee and peer reviewers at the ES Review: Spanish Journal of English Studies, particularly Dr. María Eugenia Perojo Arronte and Dr. Patricia San José Rico; and at Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos, a journal financed by the Spanish Association for American Studies, particularly Dr. María Ángeles Toda and Dr. Cristina Gámez, for the invaluable feedback provided during the publication of my articles in the respective journals. The entire process increased my confidence in academic writing and is foundational for any future work I undertake. Special thanks also to Dr. Mónica Fernández Jiménez from Universidad de Valladolid for guiding me through the administrative side of things. I would be remiss if I did not thank the teaching and non-teaching staff at Universidad de Valladolid and Universidad de Salamanca for providing a rich, culturally diverse, and stimulating learning environment. This dissertation is a result of my interest in literature and the fascinating world of languages. I express my sincere gratitude to Madame Indubala Ashok for being a wonderful teacher, educator, mentor, and guide and for helping me discover the beauty of European languages, particularly French, and for introducing me to the field of intercultural communication. I also owe great thanks to Professor Nirupama Rastogi for helping me keep the spark of linguistic interest alive and for acquainting me with translation studies which led me to discover the marvelous world of comparative literary studies. In many ways, it was in Madame Rastogi’s translation class, that I can trace my early foray into academic research, where every exercise required a deep look beyond the simple text that appeared on the printed page. Special thanks also to Dr. Kazuma Matoba and Dr. Stephen Holmes for their guidance and motivation during the initial stages of this research project. I would like to thank Freya Barua for her early insights into my research proposal and for the several inspiring and informative discussions we have had over the years. I remain, forever, in awe of Freya’s depth of knowledge and would be fortunate to emulate even a small part of her humbleness and kindness. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my friend Alex Galleli who helped me discover the captivating allure of South Asian American literature. I have come a long way from my days of simple readings of Jhumpa Lahiri to the present undertaking of analyzing a sizeable body of literature. Sara Cedolini is also a good friend who I wish to thank for her enlightening discussions and encouragement throughout the completion of this study. Much gratitude also to my dear friend Blanka Budak for helping me see the sublime in mundane things and for believing in my vision. Last but not the least, I wish to thank my father, mother, and brother for their love, affection, support, critical insights, and continuous encouragement throughout my research journey and always. You, my dear family, have taught me the true meaning of ﻓ َ ﺒ ِ ﺄ َ ى ِّ ء َ اﻻ َ ٓ ء ِ ر َ ﺑ ِّ ﻜ ُ ﻤ َ ﺎ ﺗ ُ ﻜ َ ﺬ ِّ ﺑ َ ﺎن ِ and ھ َ ﻞ ْ ﺟ َ ﺰ َ ا ٓ ء ُ ٱﻹ ْ ِ ﺣ ْ ﺴ َ ـٰ ﻦ ِ إ ِ ﻻ ﱠ ٱﻹ ْ ِ ﺣ ْ ﺴ َ ـٰ ﻦ ُ. March 31, 2022 Abstract 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, timespace 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. 7 Table of contents Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 9 Methodological Notes .................................................................................................................. 19 Part One– Parallel Worlds: Displacement in the Age of Globalization and Digital Transformation in South Asian Muslim American Literary Narratives .............................. 27 1.1 Globalization, Cultural Hybridity, Religion, and Identity Construction Determinants for South Asian Muslim Americans in the New Millennium ......................................................................................................................... 28 1.2 Changing Face of the South Asian American Diaspora and their Literature in the Twenty-First Century ...... 38 1.3 Depictions of South Asian Muslim Americanness, Belonging, Debt, and Race in Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies ..................................................................................................................................................................... 55 1.4 Structuration, Epistemo-ontology, and Ethnoconvergence in the Context of South Asian Muslim Americans in Haroon Moghul’s How to be a Muslim: An American Story .............................................................................. 63 1.5 Integration of South Asian Muslim Americans across temporal and spatial boundaries in Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place for Us ............................................................................................................................................ 73 Part Two– Shifting Perspectives: From Multicultural Identity to Transcultural Personhood in South Asian Muslim American Literature ........................................................................... 82 2.1 Theorizing Identity in South Asian Muslim American Diaspora from an Intercultural Perspective ................ 83 2.2 Transcultural Identity in South Asian Muslim Americans in Ayad Akhtar’s American Dervish ..................... 93 2.3 Return to Roots, Bearing Witness, and Transcultural Personhood Among South Asian Muslim Americans in Nafisa Haji’s The Writing on My Forehead .......................................................................................................... 103 2.4 Religious Identity Among South Asian Muslim Americans in Tahira Naqvi’s Dying in a Strange Country 112 2.5 Return of the Repressed in the Post-9/11 Era of Late Modernity for South Asian Muslim Americans in Dilruba Ahmed’s Bring Now the Angels ............................................................................................................... 121 Part Three– Beauty and Roughness: Fractal Identity During Late Modernity in South Asian Muslim American Diaspora’s Literary Imagination .................................................. 133 3.1 Theorizing a Fractal Identity Model: A Multidisciplinary Approach Connecting the Natural and Social Sciences with the Humanities ................................................................................................................................ 134 3.2 Deconstructing the Fractal “Self” and Checkers in Syed M. Masood’s The Bad Muslim Discount ............... 144 3.3 Fractality in Late Modern Times: Form follows Function in Agha Shahid Ali’s Call Me Ishmael Tonight .. 154 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 164 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................... 171 8 1 Translated from Urdu by the Indian writer, critic, and literary historian Rakshanda Jalil. 2 The Urdu text has been reproduced from www.rekhta.org. How is one to tell them That in no garden anywhere are all the flowers of one color They cannot be For, many colors live together hiding in one color Look at the fate of those who have Tried to make their garden all of one color See how a hundred colors have seeped into a single color How troubled they are How worried they look The New Ordinance1 by Javed Akhtar ! " # $ %"& '"( ) %"& *"+ , - "./0 1 23 45 6"7 89 : ; + < ="> ? 89 :@ A"B( C D " EF B( C G "7 H $ G "I J KL M"( N O P Q"R S B( C T"R EF B( C U "F V ; 9 < ! " W7 H $ U "F V X F $ T"R EF B( C Y ".Z.[9 23 4 \ ") ] F^ _`"O P M"R a A"B( C b "I c d I %"e T"7 fF d 9 g < P M"R a P h i0[9 j4k l"FBm C n "7 WR J K@ ; R < Q"7 op R M"( N O P Q"R S B( C 6"7 8R :Q"R o q" I : r F< G s.9 t u4 _@ v %"& wR P_ w Q"( x J K \ ") n "7 d 7 _`"O P M"R a A"B( C y "V P M"R a z" { : ] F^ U "F V | }.[+ j4 l"FBm C ~"9 & - •.€.•[R 23 4 ‚"I ƒ „…( †‡ :@ l"FBm C - •.€.•[R 23 4 6"• 8R a P h i0[9 j4k l"FBm C ! " # $ %"& '"( ) %"& *"+ , - "./0 1 23 45 6"7 89 : ; + < 2!"# $% & ' " ( ) *"# + , - 9 Introduction All around me I see the face of America changing. So do you if you live in cities, teach in universities, ride public transport. But where, in fiction do you read of it? Who, in other words, speaks for us, the new Americans from nontraditional immigrant countries? Which is another way of saying, in this altered America, who speaks for you? Bharati Mukherjee, “Immigrant Writing: Give Us Your Maximalists!” The rhetorical questions posed by one South Asian author shortly after her naturalization as an American citizen in 1988 compel us to reflect on the altering literary landscape in the U.S. Becoming American for these immigrants is no longer a purely bureaucratic exercise but also a literary experience, where Ellis Island is replaced by modern Court Houses handing out certificates of naturalization. “Such energy, such comedy, such sophistication and struggle and hunger to belong – yet who tells their stories?” (B. Mukherjee 1988, “Immigrant Writing”) The immigrant narratives in the late twentieth century are a departure from minimalist fiction. These new Americans have so many stories to tell from their lives that can no longer be compressed or withheld. “They’ve lived through centuries of history in a single lifetime – village-born, colonized, traditionally raised, educated. What they’ve assimilated in 30 years has taken the West 10 times that number of years to create” (B. Mukherjee 1988, “Immigrant Writing”). The post-1965 wave of immigrants and their diasporic offspring, especially those from South Asia, entering the U.S. under the highly skilled labor category are not afraid of claiming their rights and creating their niche as naturalized citizens. “These new Americans are not willing to wait for a generation or two to establish themselves. They’re working for themselves and their children, of course, but they’re not here to sacrifice themselves for the future’s sake” (B. Mukherjee 1988, “Immigrant Writing”). South Asians have a history of duality and pluralism, and their culture is steeped in accepting achievements of the ‘other’ as the ‘collective ours.’ As B. Mukherjee (1988) finally points out, “[p]erhaps it is this history-mandated training in seeing myself as ‘the other’ that now heaps on me a fluid set of identities denied to most of my mainstream American counterparts” (“Immigrant Writing”). In today’s increasingly diverse world and specifically in the U.S., which has already started changing from a traditional Anglo-centric community to a non-Anglo-centric one, we need to think about new ways of conceptualizing the immigrant and diasporic experience. Since a few decades in literary studies and social sciences, there has been a shift in the discourse from single identity to that of multiple identities, from the idea of a single American culture to multiple American cultures, without questioning the legitimacy of their Americanness. In addition to the changing nature of the diaspora, communication technologies are shrinking the world like never before in history. So, total assimilation is not only unrealistic but also impossible and should not be expected. The diasporic individual now has more ways than before to stay in touch with “home” and even wants to do so in a more positive sense. South Asian Muslim American fiction has also moved from merely narrating tales of loss and pain to exploring ways of putting to rest dualistic dilemmas and of finding comfort in this new albeit strange state of “being.” The strangeness in the new geography in which these diasporic individuals find themselves is overcome by relying on the familiar, by initially bonding with the known, and eventually creating constantly evolving, fluid, and fractal identities. 16 borders. They highlight a crisis in human values by being forced to create imaginary homelands and the continuous struggle to achieve multicultural commitment. Through vivid portrayals of life in exile, going beyond ethnicity, striving towards the enigma of cultural multiplicity, these writers narrate about a quest for identity on the alien shore, which is also their home now. They offer hope by looking beyond the diaspora, dehyphenating human relationships, and curing existential maladies. Therefore, identity is not immutable in the “homeland,” as it were. The traumas in late modernity are all too vivid in contemporary fractured identities in a vastly diverse multicultural mix like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Identities of class, caste, language, socioeconomic status, rural-urban, educated-illiterate, politicized-apolitical, sectarian-secular, religious-atheist often mingle and overlap in mysterious ways. In this context of cultural complexity (Kraidy 2004), this research analyzes the phenomena of identity formation amongst South Asian American Muslims. The choice of writers for this project is based on two main criteria: one, on the richness and relevance of their work, and two, on the scarcity of academic research of these works in particular and this demographic in general. One of the reasons for limiting the selection of authors to Muslims is to investigate the effect of religion on identity formation in the post-9/11 U.S. landscape and the more recently imposed bans on Muslims by the Trump administration, resulting in an increased Islamophobia. Therefore, the writers selected for this study offer thoughtful generational and gendered insights into the world of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi American Muslims, who practice Islam like Arab Americans but who are culturally and socially closer to non-Muslim South Asian Americans. It should be mentioned that there are more South Asian British Muslim writers who explore similar themes, owing to the colonial history of the subcontinent and the U.K. being a more popular migration destination during the raj and immediately afterward. There are also other South Asian Muslim American writers like Sara Suleri and Bapsi Sidhwa who belong to Salman Rushdie’s categorization of midnight’s children. However, shifting the focus to midnight’s grandchildren presents an opportunity to contribute to the scarcity of current research on contemporary South Asian Muslim American literature. The works published by the authors for this study, therefore, depict discursive realities that not only go beyond the traumatic themes of postcolonial writing but also deal with more contemporary issues by moving away from assimilation to carving their unique niches in the U.S., ultimately claiming their place in U.S. society as Muslim Americans. The literary narratives, that depict characters that are transcultural and fractal in nature, analyzed in this study can be situated within the sociopolitical and economic context of the late modern period as defined by prominent thinkers in the field of social sciences like Bauman (1998, 2000), Beck (1992), Giddens (1979, 1981, 1984, 1990, 1991, 1998, 1999) and Castells (2009, 2010). Unlike the widely accepted view in literary periodization where modernism gives way to postmodernism, which then transitions into a new poetic realism and beyond, the sociological conceptualization considers the period after modernism as an extension of modernity itself. The late modern period or late modernity emphasizes the intensification of the global structures, economic disjunctions, the information revolution, and the potential emancipatory politics of a late capitalist world. Bauman (2000), who introduced the idea of late modernity or liquid modernity, has defined the period as a chaotic continuation of modernity that allows an individual to fluidly transition from one social position to another owing to feelings of uncertainty in people and increased ambivalence. In the context of diasporic individuals, their breaking away from traditional support networks of their ancestral homeland and their ability to free themselves from the restrictions of placing their loyalties in a single cultural system is both a burden and a boon. The responsibility of defining hybrid cultural traditions falls on the diasporic individuals, and “the 17 result is a normative mindset with an emphasis on shifting rather than on staying—on provisional in lieu of permanent (or ‘solid’) commitment—which (the new style) can lead a person astray towards a prison of their own existential creation” (Brown 2002:196). Similarly, Giddens (1991) argues that although there has been a marked shift from traditional modernity, the current period can still be considered as “late modern” instead of postmodern. The traditionalism of modernity is now replaced by reflexive modernization as a post-traditional order where modernity becomes self-referring instead of relying on the erstwhile conservatism of classical modernity. With regards to diasporic individuals, it can be derived that when confronted with competing, uncertain, and ambiguous dilemmas in multiple homelands, their identity in late modernity is constituted of numerous self-reflexive fragments or fractals. In other words, diasporic identity “is irreducible to the vagaries of nationalism, or, more precisely, statist definitions of the self and community” (Mandalios 1999:2). Furthermore, “the idea that cultural identity is not reducible to any single, seemingly unitary juridico-political entity suggests that no ‘culture’ or society is fundamentally closed, hermetically sealed, unitary or an island unto itself” (Mandalios 1999:2). Late modernity is also referred to as reflexive modernity in the joint conceptualization of this social phenomenon by Beck, Giddens, and Lash (1994) because it opposes modernity just as modernity opposed feudal traditionalism. Additionally, according to the thinkers mentioned above, the traditional institutions of modernity are beginning to fall apart in the face of today’s economic and cultural globalization. The transnational nature of corporations and non-governmental organizations is paving new ways for the rights of all individuals, including the diaspora, as can be seen in the appointment of Indian Americans as CEOs of global companies like PepsiCo, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter. The trio of thinkers argues that the changing nature of the family, the flexibility and increased opportunities for work, the lack of solidarity with a single political agenda due to the global nature of the enterprise, have all paved way to the rise of individualization. These three sociologists draw our attention to different aspects of late modernity. If Beck (1992) characterizes this as the age of risk society, then Giddens (1998) proposes a third way of formulating social policies that consider the challenges and risks posed by late modernity, and finally, Bauman (1998) focuses on the social side effects of globalization which has created new divisions between those who are essential and those who are excluded from the global flow of information in this hyper-technological age. Coupled with late modernity is the concept of the information age or the network society as defined by Castells (2009), who argues that in the new world economic order, industrialization has been replaced by informationalism. He posits that the network formed by the social, economic, and political interrelationships is the critical defining feature of the contemporary era. The culture of virtuality is organized around electronic mass and social media. One might consider that Castells’ conceptualization of the space of flows as a timespace where “the material arrangements allow for the simultaneity of social practices without territorial contiguity” (1999:295) that permit the transcultural diasporic individual to possess fractal identities. Furthermore, such a time-space “is not purely electronic space [...] it is made up first of all of a technological infrastructure of information systems, telecommunications, and transportation lines” (1999:295). And that “the capacity and characteristics of this infrastructure and the location of its elements determine the functions of the space of flows, and its relationship to other spatial forms and processes” (1999:295). For diasporic individuals, it can be considered that the process of reflexive modernization allows them to question not only the cultural dominance of their ancestral homeland but also the cultural and political hegemony of their adopted homeland. Instead of expanding the perimeter of their traditional identity, they can reevaluate the choices accorded to them by multiple homelands, resulting in the reformation, 18 optimization, and adaptation of their fractal identities through self-reflexivity. The network society in which these diasporic individuals live also allows them to dismantle knowledge barriers with the help of technology, further enhancing the process of self-reflexivity in late modernity. The authors and works selected for analysis in this study are a result of the network society and use the newly available and easily accessible information from multiple worldviews to inform their own identities and those of their literary characters. In conclusion, the dilemmas and tribulations of the late modern “self” are distinct from its predecessors in the last century. Therefore, today’s definition of 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, but in addition, it should also offer a mechanism to explain that individual’s links with the “unfamiliar” environment sensibly and sensitively. As a coherent and consistent construct, identity in diasporic individuals is currently hotly debated among literary scholars and social scientists. It will continue to intrigue individuals and groups that have been displaced from their homelands and those that receive these displaced entities. To go beyond first-generation diaspora, Rayaprol (2005) draws our attention to their children and grandchildren, thus highlighting the generational aspect of migration as an increasingly relevant area of research. She also touches upon some gender aspects and mainly on religion as an important factor distinguishing South Asian Americans from their other Asian American counterparts. Research into the resurgence of religious identity and religiosity and its inseparability from contemporary American identity in South Asian Muslim American literature may be considered one of this project’s important contributions. This is particularly timely and necessary insomuch as, especially after 9/11, the Muslim American identity is seen to pose a significant threat to the mainstream American identity. Given the increasing Islamophobia in the U.S., more so during the Trump administration from right-wing social and ideological circles, the emergence of an American identity linked with Islam appears menacing to the stability of the prevailing secular American identity. Notwithstanding, in the post-9/11 U.S., there is an increased need for interfaith dialogue and the prospering of healthy citizenship and holistic identity development in the children and grandchildren of the diaspora. In both its canonical and late modern manifestations, the choice to consider religion as an uncompromised part of their fractal identity, without any fear or remorse, should be freely available to the diaspora and should not be considered a failure to assimilate. Based on literary fiction as an expression of human experience, and by using select characters from the works of firstand second-generation writers, this dissertation analyzes contemporary literary works for the effects of displacement on the South Asian Muslim diaspora and their trajectories of “being,” “becoming,” and “belonging.” The nostalgia and the longing for traditions from the former homeland and the critical inquiry into their relevance in the adopted homeland reflect the challenges faced by the diaspora in their identity (re)formation process. Having to straddle between two worlds, needing to make difficult choices, questioning the need to retain the old traditions are complex dilemmas that shape their identity, the kind of individuals they are and want to become. Gender, generation, and faith in the light of present-day economics, religion, and politics are interspersed throughout the study as essential constituents of identity. Is the possibility of fractal identities viable in the long run? What are the psychological and emotional implications for the individual and their personality development? Is the acceptance of such multi-identity individuals by themselves and by others possible? These are questions worth pondering, researching, and answering. 19 Methodological Notes The social sciences fear the radical impulse in literary studies, and over the decades, we in the humanities have trivialized the social sciences into their rational expectation straitjackets, not recognizing that whatever the state of the social sciences in our own institution, strong tendencies toward acknowledging the silent but central role of the humanities in the area studies paradigm are now around. Gayathri Spivak, Death of a Discipline At the outset, it is essential to clarify some definitions and terminology used throughout this dissertation before proceeding any further with the methodology used in this research project and before outlining its structure. Firstly, the term ‘diaspora’ has been used instead of ‘immigrant’ as it is more appropriate to refer to the naturalized citizens as diasporic individuals rather than immigrants. The term ‘immigrant’ refers to newly-arrived individuals who are still at the beginning of their journey of establishing their place and identity in a foreign country. Whereas diasporas are more settled and, in addition to economic advancement, they also play an active role in the political and social aspects of their adopted homeland (Edwards 2007). At the same time, diasporas maintain a strong connection with their heritage homelands, and as transnational communities, they influence and are influenced by multiple cultures irrespective of where they are physically located (Sigona et al. 2014). If the literary artists selected in this research project are examples of the lived reality of Muslim Americans, then their works are a demonstration of the diasporic imaginary. “[P]olitical and social battles often emerge powerfully in the domain of the aesthetic and especially when the aesthetic is also a critique. […] [T]he demotic itself becomes the discourse of the aesthetic, we begin to understand the hitherto silenced” (V. Mishra 2007:21) narratives and discourses of Americanness. Secondly, the use of the term “(South Asian) Muslim American” has been privileged over the use of “(South Asian) American Muslim” as it refers to Muslims of South Asian descent who reside in America as opposed to South Asian Americans who are Muslim. The adjective “Muslim” is the modifier for the noun (South Asian) American to highlight the notion of cultural expression as opposed to religion and religiosity (Yulianto 2018). Further, given the diversity within Islam itself, “(South Asian) Muslim American Identity” relates to diasporic identity associated with Muslims rather than Americans. As evident from the analysis of various literary works in this research, the notion of being “Muslim” is an integral part of the conceptualization of “Americanness,” whether the writers and the literary universes created by them display overt religiosity or not. Thirdly, some clarity is needed concerning the generational status of the diasporic individuals, mainly since the terms “first-generation” and “secondgeneration” are frequently used interchangeably. The classification in this research follows the definitions set out by the U.S. Census Bureau (2019). Therefore, first-generation American refers to anyone born outside the U.S. and has become a naturalized U.S. citizen or classified as foreignborn. Second-generation American refers to the native-born U.S. citizens with at least one parent being born outside the U.S. Third-and-higher generation American refers to native-born U.S. citizens, both whose parents were born in the U.S. Lastly, the term “(Indian) Subcontinent” refers to the geographical area in South Asia that includes the countries of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka (Mann 2014). This term is also used to highlight the cultural similarities and the influence of local customs and traditions on Islam, as seen in the literary works analyzed here. 20 Now that the key terms have been defined, before providing some methodological notes and overview of the different chapters of this research project, it seems appropriate to discuss its purpose. The primary objective of this dissertation is to analyze the processes of “being” and “becoming” and the strategies of “belonging” adopted by the South Asian Muslim American diaspora in (re)constructing their identity in their adopted homeland despite the inequalities and injustices of the dominant groups. An attempt is made to move away from the postcolonial conceptualization of “third spaces” (Bhabha 1994), and arguments of “thirdworlding” the dominant mainstream are studied from the perspective of reflexive modernization (Giddens 1991). The uniqueness of each individual and their need to coexist simultaneously in multiple time-spaces is highlighted in the selected literary works. These literary representations desire to “fit in” mainstream American literature not by the opposition of power but by expanding the perimeter of the very forces that seek to exclude them. Therefore, the focus has been shifted from postcolonialism to transculturation and transculturalism (Ortiz 1995; Lewis 2002, 2008, 2010, 2011; Epstein 2009, 2016; Slimbach 2005) as an alternative framework for analyzing identity (re)construction among such diasporic individuals. The narratives in the selected literary works straddle between multiple geographies, and identity is developed through gradual learning from recurring reflexive life experiences. Further, by using the theory of fractals (Mandelbrot 1982) from mathematics, the secondary objective of this research is to conceptualize the identity of diasporic individuals, such that it can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole. Fractals provide an opportunity to represent the “complexity” in understanding the infinite nature of human identity, shifting the focus from multiple or plural identities to more complex, dynamic, fluid, and transient identities. Properties of fractal objects found in the physical world are comparable to the varied identity layers in diasporic individuals. Therefore, they provide a basis for explaining possible ways to coexist simultaneously or “fractally” in different homelands amidst the shrinking geographical distances and technological advances in travel and communication mediums. Moving on to some notes on methodology–all research in general, including literary analysis, must contain two elements. The theoretical aspect and application of the theory to explain what it tells us about the literary work, how it adapts or not to reality, what answers it provides, and, more importantly, what problems it poses in our reading of the literary work and our understanding of its characters and their narratives. Following Kaelin’s (1964) idea of literary criticism as composed of two aspects, a workable method of analysis (aesthetics) and travaux pratiques, the use of the procedure laid down (criticism), this research uses an eclectic methodology that engages elements of textual analysis (narratology and close reading), as well as transcultural studies relating to aspects of communication, behavior, and psychology of diasporic individuals. Further, this research uses an identity construction framework based on Mandelbrot’s (1982) fractal theory and the concept of transcultural personhood derived from Lewis’ (2002) and Slimbach’s (2005) models of transculturalism. An integrative approach has been followed to allow us to view identity construction in such individuals in all its complex and hybrid manifestations as a truly multivariate phenomenon. A similar approach is also taken by many of the leading cultural identity theoreticians whose models have been discussed here. In that respect this work echoes all their primary concerns and extends their theories to reflect the contemporary reality better. A transcultural reading of the literary works makes the literary analysis relevant to the changing needs of the new century. Transcultural adaptation is viewed as a universal human phenomenon. It is far from being a solitary variable given the thriving chaos in identity construction that is both impacted by and impacts globalization, communication, and literature dynamically and 21 evolutionarily. The use of fractals allows us to account for the complexity, hybridity, and irregularity in identity construction in today’s world. The multidisciplinary approach used to theorize fractal identity draws from the principles of mathematics, psychology, and cultural theory by adapting it to critically analyze literary narratives produced in the last twenty years. Further, the fractal identity framework outlined in this research satisfies Kitcher’s three principles of a good (scientific) theory. The first is unity when the theory consists of “just one problem-solving strategy, or a small family of problem-solving strategies, that can be applied to a wide range of problems” (1983:47). The fractal identity framework helps to address identarian formation and development issues at multiple levels and for various groups and classes of people. Further, the theory can be applied to analyze the content of the chosen work and its form combining a wide array of literary aesthetic techniques into a single framework. The second is fecundity where “a good theory should be productive; it should raise new questions and presume those questions can be answered without giving up its problem-solving strategies” (1983:48). The nature of human identity is forever evolving, and so are the surrounding environmental factors where these individuals are situated. The fractal identity theory provides a basis for questioning the status-quo, which should develop depending on the needs of the time. The advantage of using a multidisciplinary framework is that it allows us to employ the breakthroughs in the underlying fields associated with our core theory to advance research in our chosen domain. The third is auxiliary hypothesis which “ought to be testable independently of the particular problem it is introduced to solve, independently of the theory it is designed to save” (1983:46). The boundary conditions have been defined in the form of fractal space, critical traits in the form of fractal dimensions, and each of these dimensions has specific competencies that are measurable both qualitatively and quantitatively. Multiplicity and complexity are further explained using the properties of fractal geometry, and it is possible to analyze and break down each personality layer of the mise en abyme that forms the complex identity amongst diasporic individuals. Generally, in the social sciences, a theory can be validated using either qualitative (emic) or quantitative (etic) approaches or ideally using a combination of both methods to achieve a more holistic result. Since this is literary research, it is necessary to use the qualitative analysis methodology for studying the literary narratives, their form, and their characters in selected works by South Asian Muslim American authors published in the twenty-first century. The methodological framework draws from the principles of narrative analysis based on psychotherapy which uses narratives to deconstruct and make meaning (White and Epston 1990). The relevance of this technique in analyzing literary identities, especially in the transcultural domain, allows a non-essentialized approach to identity. Narrative practices require us to separate persons from qualities or attributes that are taken-for-granted essentialisms through externalization. The positive and negative life experiences are detached from the individual such that the person is not the problem; rather the problem is the problem. Through self-reflection, the diasporic individuals can then engage in the construction and performance of preferred identities. A novel or a play can be considered a set of narratives that inform us about its characters' life episodes and their sociocultural circumstances. In literary criticism, using the principles of narratology, we can examine how these narratives structure our perception of cultural identities. Further, our ordering of time and space in narrative forms constitutes one of the primary ways we construct meaning in general. “Far from being one code among many that a culture may utilize for endowing experience with meaning, the narrative is a meta-code, a human universal on the basis of which transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted” (White 1990:1). Identity construction can be metaphorically described as a journey in both space and time, or in other 22 words, to understand who we are and who we want to become –we need to travel to other places. We can decipher the processes of “being” and “becoming” through narratives. The primary idea that gives meaning to identity construction in literary works is the process of self-reflection and the character’s journey across multiple homelands. In psychotherapy, similar reflections are captured through narrative conversations between the therapist and the client. In literary criticism, the text itself constitutes the narrative. Our (the researcher’s) close reading of the text helps us to arrive at the characters’ inner and outer transcultural journeys. Some characters experience critical incidents and personal crises during their lives which lead them to reevaluate their way of living seriously. They do this by existentially reflecting on their lives. They reflect upon their past, present as well as future. When faced by cultural tensions and conflicts, “identity construction becomes a reflexive project, whereby the person must be able to reconsider standpoints and ways of living in the light of changes. Their journeys to other places (both outer and inner) give them perspectives on themselves and develop their self-awareness in a more reflexive manner” (Lindgren and Wåhlin 2001:369). A similar methodological approach based on “epiphanies” found in interpretative biographies is used to assess a literary character’s reaction to events framed as turning points involving confrontation and experiencing personal, professional, or moral crises. Analysis of literary works, particularly biographies “rests on subjectively and intersubjectively gained knowledge and understanding of the life experiences of individuals, including one’s own life” (Denzin 1989:27-28). All the works selected as a part of this research project reveal accounts of individuals after significant changes in their lives, in this case, either by crossing the border and moving from the subcontinent to the U.S or concerning the rising Islamophobia after 9/11. We can get an insight into the physical, emotional, and psychological transformation and adaptation of such transcultural diasporic individuals and the transcultural journey itself by probing these literary narratives and viewing them through the lens of fractal identity. Before discussing the structure of this dissertation, it seems pertinent to provide a brief note about the motivation for this study. Having lived in the European Union for over fifteen years now, the topic of diasporic identity has been a constant source of challenges and opportunities personally and professionally for me. My background in mathematics and computer sciences, a deep interest in learning European languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, and German, and exposure to American media and the anglophone world in India, have guided the multidisciplinary nature of this research. Like many Indians, the boom in the information technology industry has led me closer to American cultural and business practices having worked either directly with U.S. companies or with firms servicing U.S. clients. I was naturally drawn to South Asian American fiction both for its ability to offer a glimpse of life for diasporic individuals outside India and the stories about characters that were personally and professionally relatable to me. While there was a great deal of focus on British Asian fiction in India, it was still strongly overshadowed by the colonial legacy of the British Empire, and this is not something many from my generation can fully relate to. Whereas South Asian American authors such as Bharathi Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla, and Jhumpa Lahiri wrote about a new generation of Indians trying to forge hybrid identities in the U.S., my initial interest in these new-age narratives has informed my research into literary texts depicting diasporic experience in the new millennium. The twenty-first century presents a unique set of difficulties for the Muslim diaspora, especially after the events of 9/11, and at the same time also grants more possibilities to the diasporic individual to inhabit multiple time zones and spaces, both converging and diverging numerous identities in these deemed outsiders. Being a Muslim led me to dive further into the nature of an identity rooted in Islamic culture and traditions from the subcontinent. I desired to move away 23 from a traditional postcolonial reading of diasporic fiction. I decided to draw from my European academic pursuits of a Masters course in Diversity Management from the Rennes School of Business in France, a Masters in Advanced English Studies from the Universidad de Valladolid in Spain, and my two-decade-long professional experience in the field of foreign language teaching, translation, and intercultural training in the corporate sector in India and Europe to study diasporic identity from an intercultural lens. However, I soon realized that life in the new millennium coupled with the generational advancement of the erstwhile immigrants into the more established diaspora who yearn to belong to multiple homelands simultaneously, requires a more complex theoretical tool for analyzing identity. My early academic background in mathematics helped forge an attempt to combine concepts from the pure sciences, social sciences, and literary studies to the analysis of diasporic identity. Therefore, this study is the culmination of a twenty-year effort in understanding the processes of “being” and “becoming” in the South Asian diaspora. After outlining the methodological considerations and the motivation for this study, it is also necessary to explain the structure of this dissertation, which has been established based on three main lines of inquiry: the “location” of South Asian Muslim Americans, the role of “transnationality,” and the “complexity” or “fractality” of identity in the contemporary diasporic imagination. The first part deals with the depiction of parallel worlds, highlighting the nature and effect of displacement in the age of globalization and digital transformation in the new millennium. The second part focuses on shifting perspectives from discussions of multicultural and intercultural identity in postcolonial writing to transcultural identity and reflexive modernization in the era of late modernity. Finally, the third part attempts to theorize lived and imagined realities in and beyond the age of late modernity by exploring the concept of fractal identity in the twenty-first century. Throughout the dissertation, the analysis of religion plays a vital role in connecting western literary criticism techniques within the context of a late modern, transcultural, and fractal identity. Each part contains at least one chapter on theoretical considerations from a sociological perspective relevant to the section’s thematic concerns. Several literary narratives are analyzed in each part based on the central theme of identity and its complex nature. Each chapter containing literary analysis includes a brief biography of the author and a summary of key themes from their literary fiction, as well as the impact of their lived realities on their imaginary productions. On the theme of displacement in the age of globalization and digital transformation in Part One, Chapter 1.1 discusses vital theoretical aspects of cultural globalization, hybridity, cultural complexity, and reflexive modernization. It briefly touches upon cultural identity before discussing factors like ethnorelativism, assimilation, and acculturation that act as impediments to cultural identity. The objective here is to provide a background of the socio-cultural, political, and economic factors that are unique to identity construction discussions today, especially in the context of South Asian Muslim Americans. Chapter 1.2 provides background on specific demographic details about South Asian Muslim Americans and the changing face of this diaspora and its literature. Key terms such as diaspora and their relevance are further explained. The importance of religion in the context of South Asian Muslims is described. Migration trends since the 1960s are discussed along with an overview of the changing nature of diasporic novels. Further, some key concepts of transcultural literature and transcultural novels are introduced. Lastly, the idea of fractals as a tool for analyzing hyper-complexity in diasporic identity and literary analysis is presented. The first half of this chapter is sociological in nature, and the second half focuses on approaches for literary analysis of relevance to this research project. Chapter 1.3 presents an analysis of the novel Homeland Elegies (2020) by the second-generation Pakistani American author Ayad Akhtar in the context of globalization, cultural complexity, racial politics (A. Ahmed 24 2007, 2010) for Muslim Americans, and the economic aspects (Darity, Hamilton, and Stewart 2010) of the American dream through different characters in the novel. The novel’s narrative style alternates between reality and fiction, blurring the narrator’s role as a fictional character to a point where the reader can’t know if the narration is autobiographical or fictional. The novel is an example of essential debates in relation to the meaning of “belonging,” financial success, and race in the U.S. Chapter 1.4 frames an epistemo-ontological argument in the backdrop of structuration theory based on concepts by Bourdieu (1977), Bhaskar (1978), and Giddens (1991) and comments on the societal impact of 9/11 on identity construction for Muslim Americans in the secondgeneration Pakistani American writer Haroon Moghul’s memoir How to be a Muslim: An American Story (2017). It also includes a discussion on ethnoconvergence (Nayak (2011); Ribas (2011); Merrell (2011)) and relates the concept to the memoir as well as Moghul’s work in the field of interfaith dialogue between Muslims and Jews. Chapter 1.5 argues about the need to move away from assimilationist approaches to an integration approach by analyzing the novel A Place for Us (2018) by the second-generation Indian American writer Fatima Farheen Mirza in light of space-time theories (Giddens (1984), Dodgshon (1999), Král (2014)). This analysis succinctly illustrates the overall theme of finding one’s place in the diasporic family and the U.S. as depicted in the lives of different characters from the novel. Further, this chapter illustrates the changing role of borders through temporal and spatial boundaries in constituting diasporic identity. Regarding a shift in perspective from multicultural identity to transcultural personhood in Part Two, Chapter 2.1 focuses on defining culture, cultural identity, multiculturalism and its drawbacks, pluralism, and interculturalism. It discusses various models of theorizing multicultural and intercultural identity. It explores the idea of using the concept of ‘personhood’ instead of ‘identity’ in tracing the developmental trajectory of the diasporic individual. A definition of culture proposed by the Cultural Studies scholar Jeff Lewis (2002) is provided as an alternative to existing conceptualizations highlighting its relevance and need in the twenty-first century. Chapter 2.2 analyzes the various theoretical concepts of transculturalism developed by scholars from different disciplines: Ortiz (1995), Cuccioletta (2001), Slimbach (2005), Lewis (2002), Vauclair et al. (2014), Dagnino (2015), and Bond and Rapson (2014). Second-generation Pakistani American author Ayad Akhtar’s pre-9/11 debut novel American Dervish (2013) is analyzed considering various principles of transcultural identity discussed in the previous chapter. The intertextuality and transculturality of the novel are analyzed to understand better the identarian process in the context of South Asian Muslim Americans. In Chapter 2.3, the focus is shifted towards the return to roots, the generational responsibility to bear witness to the ancestral homeland and its cultural traditions, and the manifestation of transcultural personhood in Nafisa Haji’s novel The Writing on My Forehead (2010). Lewis’ (2002) principles of transculturalism, language wars, and the role of Western media are used to discuss the identarian journey of the novel’s protagonist, who is incidentally a journalist. The novel examines the expectations from women and the constraints placed on them by religion through a second-generation narrative spanning both Indian and Pakistani American identities in the work of this second-generation Indo-Pak American novelist. Since religion is a core aspect of the Muslim American identity, Chapter 2.4 analyzes a firstgeneration Pakistani American narrative in Tahira Naqvi’s collection of short stories Dying in a Strange Country (2001). It discusses the creation and negotiation of Muslim identity in the material and spiritual worlds, drawing heavily on Islamic concepts of life and identity beyond death. Extensive footnotes to explain Quranic concepts relevant to understanding Muslim identity in a Western context have been added. Continuing the theme of religion in the context of late modernity, Chapter 2.5 focuses on reflexivity, but instead of discussing reflexive identity 25 formation, it uses Giddens’ (1991) concept of the tribulations of the “self” and return of the “repressed” to explore religious identity and religiosity in the second-generation Bangladeshi American poet Dilruba Ahmed’s latest collection of poems Bring Now the Angels (2020). The literary form of these poems ranges from traditional lyrical poetry to a new-age composition style created, for example through autocomplete options provided by a Google search. The poems offer a deep insight into the post-9/11 Muslim American psyche and the struggle for maintaining a distinctly South Asian Muslim American identity in opposition to an Arab American Muslim identity. Lastly, concerning the changing role of religion and its impact on the lives of Muslims in contemporary America, the focus is shifted to questions of cultural and identarian complexity during late modernity in Part Three. Literary narratives are analyzed based on the principles of fractal geometry, both in terms of their form and the fractal identity of their characters. Consequently, the purpose of Chapter 3.1 is to provide a simplified background for mathematical concepts from fractal geometry for a literary audience and to draw parallels with human identity in the case of transcultural diasporas. The model is based on fundamental concepts by Mandelbrot (1982), Falconer (2006), and Slimbach (2005), among others. By combining theoretical ideas from the natural and social sciences, an attempt is made to demonstrate the use of pure sciences to explain literary phenomena. Subsequently, the aim of Chapter 3.2 is to use the core theoretical concepts defined in the previous chapter in the literary analysis of fractal identity. The firstgeneration Pakistani American author Syed M. Masood’s novel The Bad Muslim Discount (2020) is an excellent example of the manifestation of fractal identity in a literary narrative and serves as a representation of the fractal structure of the narrative itself. Set against the background of a strategy board game called checkers, the novel is structurally divided into parts where each part represents a key strategic aspect of the game. Within each part, individual chapters alternate between two narrators who are geographically separated but culturally connected to Islam. One narrator’s journey starts in the U.S., and the other narrator’s journey ends in Canada, passing through the U.S. Midway through the novel the narrators meet, and the narrative merges in such a way that both stories combine into a single tale, often blurring the singular voice of each narrator. Like fractals, the layers within the narratives and the narrators’ personalities represent the complexity of identity through each narrator’s relationship with practicing Islam in twenty-firstcentury America. If the previous chapter uses the concepts of fractal identity to analyze a fractal narrative, then the intention of Chapter 3.3 is to use fractals to demonstrate the fractal nature of poetic form and its conduciveness to manifest a fractal poetic imagination. The first-generation Kashmiri (Indian) Muslim American poet Aga Shahid Ali popularized a hybrid form of poetry in American literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Modeled after the most popular poetic form in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu literary tradition called ghazal, this poetic composition consists of seven to twelve rhyming couplets with no connection between each other yet enjoined throughout by a common theme. The English ghazal, like its oriental counterpart, resembles a fractal object. A parallel is drawn between the strict compositional rules of the ghazal (Kanda (1998); Nathani (1992)); and the gestalt of features that characterize a fractal form: non-integral dimensionality, self-similarity, emergence, irregularity, and recursion (Falconer 2006). The theme of Muslim identity in the contemporary U.S. is the commonality that runs through each ghazal and the totality of ghazals included in the posthumously published collection Call Me Ishmael Tonight (2003). In conclusion, the methodological approaches for literary analysis based on the principles of narratology and close reading have been established. The rationale behind dividing the 32 moving into the present time, with the influx of non-European immigrants with entirely different value systems and religious beliefs. Assimilation theory promotes a melting-pot approach where all cultural differences gradually blend into a single American culture. In the case of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia, they appear to preserve their ethnic and religious identities very strongly. Further research indicates that while there is a high correlation between the assimilation rates of various generations, there are significant differences in assimilation practice within the home and outside (Johnston 1969). This indicates the presence of multiple identities and attitudes and defeats the purpose of assimilation in the sense of complete mainstreaming. Another perspective on the transgenerational aspect of assimilation in a comparative study on established and newcomer generations of Americans living in the Silicon Valley suggests that: The multigenerational process of assimilation for the post-1965 wave of immigrants is not the only way that American society will change. As the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the post-1965 immigrants come of age, they will be part of the established population that will play host to the successive waves of immigrants. Like their forebearers, this newly established population will find that contact with the next wave of newcomers will force them to adjust to contexts once again being reconfigured by immigration. Immigrant newcomers and established individuals will be strangers to each other. And America will be again remade through a bumpy process that ultimately makes them more familiar. (Jimenez 2017:239) Therefore, the assimilation model posited by the proponents of the melting pot theory needs to be revised to incorporate a more diverse type of immigrants into the American mainstream. The continuity in assimilation is inevitable, and something that has been practiced for over two centuries needs time to change. While it is good to have alternatives in place in the long term, in the short and medium-term, it is essential to understand the impact of this continued assimilation in education, culture, economy, and politics on American society and on the diaspora, whether long-established or their successive generations, in the minority or majority. In the twenty-first century, boundaries will inevitably be crossed and blurred. The contours of race and ethnicity will be changed, and non-white demographic narratives will eventually color the white hegemonic discourse. However, if American society continues to push for assimilation, “even if it expands to embrace non-Europeans, it is unlikely to dissolve racial distinctions entirely in the United States and to end the inequalities rooted in them” (Alba and Nee 2005:292). Progress can only be made by adopting a salad-bowl type approach that allows each cultural and ethnic group to retain its uniqueness such that multiplicity is the norm rather than the exception. “The pluralist alternative envisions that, in the contemporary world, the choice to live in an ethnic, social, and cultural matrix need not be associated with the loss of the advantages once afforded almost exclusively by the mainstream” (Alba and Nee 2005:6). Assimilation does not favor the development of multiple identities among diasporic populations. It needs to be rethought in the context of increasing globalization and cultural hybridity that is so typical of American society today. The third factor hindering the identity development process in diasporic individuals is acculturation. This term was introduced in the late nineteenth century by the American ethnologist J. W. Powell, to describe the psychological changes in Native Americans who were observed to imitate White Americans in terms of language, dressing and other socio-cultural customs (R. Harris 2013). Several proponents of this theory originated in anthropology, and sociologists furthered that. However, in the past few decades, psychologists have done considerable work on this theory. Berry’s (2005, 2008) model is the most well-known model for explaining acculturation in cross-cultural psychology. While there is a hint of positivity, the theoretical foundation of acculturation arises from practices involving discrimination, exclusion, segregation, or exclusion 33 of the out-group individuals by the mainstream group. The model has been used extensively to describe the adaptation strategies of first-generation immigrants, sojourners, refugees, asylum seekers in societies and camps, and indigenous people (David & Berry 2006). This approach might have been suitable to explain people’s reaction in the postcolonial era, where the rhetoric consisted of establishing a level playing field for poor migrants, or in the case of long-term migrants (sojourners), or those suffering from social and political persecution. However, in the case of immigrants from South Asia who have been drawn to the U.S. in pursuit of highly paid economic activities, with the shrinking of geographical boundaries in the age of globalization and cultural hybridity, such a model based on a unidirectional acculturation strategy is insufficient primarily to explain identity development, especially among those who have migrated to the U.S. after 1965. Furthermore, Leonard (2005) points out the increasing diversity in terms of geographic origin, skill levels, religious and caste affiliations of immigrants from the subcontinent: The recent immigrants are not rural people but predominantly urban, highly educated professionals. They are migrating in family units, women and children accompanying the men. Many religions are represented, many kinds of Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Christians, Sikhs, and Parsis (Zoroastrians). Also, many “traditional” caste and community categories still have some significance in the lives of immigrants, particularly in the choice of marriage partners. The diversity of the subcontinent is well represented in the United States. (6667) Given the predominant cultural diversity within the South Asian diaspora that is already used to a highly multicultural environment in the subcontinent, acculturation seems to be a step backward. It does not work very well even in monoethnic groups, and unless expanded to include other more complex dimensions, this pure constructionist approach towards diasporic individual identity development is not equipped to handle the complexities of the twenty-first century. Lastly, while the difference between ethnocentrism and the two other negative factors mentioned above is apparent, it may be worthwhile to clarify the distinction between assimilation and acculturation. These are two different processes that may occur independently of each other. Acculturation is a necessary but not sufficient condition for assimilation, and an indefinite amount of acculturation is needed before assimilation can even begin (Teske and Nelson 1974). It is now time to move to the discussion of positive determinants for diasporic identity construction. The first factor favoring the identity development process in diasporic individuals is ethnorelativism which is in direct contrast to ethnocentrism. Bennett conceptualized this paradigm in the context of developing intercultural competence among individuals to help them enlarge the radius of their cultural reality. Bennett (1986) created the Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) based on a constructivist approach and grounded in communication theory as a tool to explain how people create boundaries between the “self” and the “other” when they are faced with cultural differences. The model is mainly used in the intercultural communication education and training fields to measure a person’s cultural competence. It also has interesting implications for the analysis of identity in literary texts about migration. It describes a developmental approach along a scale of increasing awareness and sensitivity from one’s own culture to one’s adopted culture. When applied to religious diversity, this model maps the development of interreligious competence among multicultural individuals from a psychological perspective. “Religious diversity is a reality in many social contexts. For religious individuals, pluralism often presents a particularly radical confrontation with the constructed nature of one's own meaning system” (Morgan and Sandage 2016:133). This is particularly true within the South Asian Muslim American diaspora, where in addition to inter-religious diversity, there is also intrareligious diversity. For example, in South Asia, Sunnis and Shias have different mosques, and 34 there is often communal tension between people from these Islamic sects. However, in the U.S., these Muslims might be forced to use the same place of worship and therefore require developing some intra-religious competence within the diasporic boundaries. With the current climate of globalization and cultural hybridity, individuals keep oscillating between ethnocentrism and ethnorelativism at different stages of their “being” and “becoming,” especially in matters of religion. This is more pronounced in the second and subsequent generation Muslim diaspora in some cases due to the prevailing socio-political attitudes towards Islam and in other cases due to increased electronic connectivity and easily accessible information on social media from other countries practicing Islam. However, the coexistence of multiple religious ideologies is an inescapable feature of the twenty-first century, and societies, and individuals need to adopt an ethnorelativistic view toward various faiths and beliefs for, … (religious) pluralism is not going away; if anything it will become an increasingly apparent reality. Therefore individuals can choose to withdraw into echo chambers of their own belief or learn to engage across difference and trust with an open curiosity and humble self-reflection that such relationships will ultimately deepen their spirituality. (Morgan and Sandage 2016:152-153) The second factor favoring the identity development process in diasporic individuals is integration which is in direct opposition to assimilation. From a Durkheimian (1933) perspective, integration implies the inclusion of outgroup members into the mainstream society to develop a collective social consciousness. The new and existing group members feel an integrated sense of social belonging. From a diasporic perspective, in addition to social integration, it is also essential to consider the economic and identity aspects of integration to make sense of the developmental aspects of the incoming individuals. The ultimate objective of integration is to foster a society with safety, stability, and justice without voluntary or involuntary assimilation. As we have seen above, the proponents of assimilation argue that successive generations of immigrants in the U.S. will blend in to form a singular American culture practiced by the mainstream, implying that all other forms of cultural expressions are non-American. However, “the demographic realities of the United States have given additional momentum to the rethinking in progress on the assimilation of immigrants and their descendants” (Alba and Nee 2005:8). The post-1965 wave of immigrants constitute about twenty percent of the American population according to the 2000 U.S. census data, and they “have achieved a critical mass sufficient to exercise a strong, if not increasingly dominant, influence on regional developments” (Alba and Nee 2005:9). Furthermore, it should be noted that: Historically, the American mainstream, which originated with the colonial northern European settlers, has evolved through incremental inclusion of ethnic and racial groups that formerly were excluded and accretion of parts of their cultures to the composite culture. Although cultural elements from the earliest groups have been preserved—in this sense there is great cultural continuity—elements contributed from subsequent immigrant groups have been incorporated continually into the mainstream. (Alba and Nee 2005:12) The construct of integration is rooted in the idea of a multicultural society that includes people from different ethnicities, religions, and races. They form an integral part of the social and economic fabric rather than remaining marginalized. On the one hand, Glazer and Moynihan (2005) urge us to think beyond the melting pot where the diaspora can maintain their own unique ethnic identities instead of blending into the mainstream resulting in a more enriched and diverse society. On the other hand, Orosco (2016) provides a sharp critique of the assimilation models still prevalent in the U.S. and urges us to topple the melting pot paving the way for alternative approaches favoring integration by pragmatic American thinkers Horace Kallen and John Dewey. 35 While Kallen’s “alternative democratic society permits immigrants to preserve certain aspects of their group culture and thereby alter the way US American national identity can be conceived” (Orosco 2016:117), Dewey, amended the scope of cultural pluralism so that different ethnic and immigrant groups can maintain their traditions so long as they do not harm individuals, but more importantly, they can also share their traditions and practices with one another, and with dominant society, in deliberative conversations. In the process of doing so, they would help to develop a richer and more robust US American identity that incorporates the best from many different ways of life. (Orosco 2016:117-118) Therefore, integration aims to merge culture, development, and social theory such that we can conceptualize a reality beyond the singular mindset of assimilation towards a pluralistic approach that can work within the constraints of globalization and the framework of cultural hybridity. It has been suggested that: As the world enters the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is evident that, despite the widespread culture of denial that persists in sweeping our major common problems under the collective carpet, it is entering and has indeed already entered a period of unprecedented crisis. Unprecedented not only because of the scale of the problems, but equally because of the convergence of what were once seen to be, if considered problems at all, quite separate ones, and because the evidence is that the tools that we have used in the past to manage the crises that have beset human society are no longer adequate to the tasks in hand. (Clammer 2012:3) The hijab and the beard continue to be frowned upon in today’s U.S. culture. Still, they seem to be symbols of revolt rather than faith, openly flaunted not by the first-generation immigrants but by their successive younger generations. Most of the theories used to understand the development of identity in diasporic individuals are based in the traditional cultural studies domain, but their “approach to social reality has been narcissistic and has failed, like the postmodernism that gave birth to much of it, to address the larger questions of human life” (Clammer 2012:243). Additionally, to understand these post-millennials who are disrupting and reshaping the U.S. hegemony, we need to break away from the “weak and inadequate philosophical anthropology – a failure to grasp the fullness of human being and as a consequence to develop the tools for a deeper understanding of processes of change and transformation” (Clammer 2012:243). The third factor favoring the identity development process in diasporic individuals is enculturation which provides a viable alternative to the acculturation approach. Researchers like Spindler (1968) and Kottak (2013) have approached it from a socialization perspective stressing the aspect of the acquisition of culture by an individual to function appropriately in society. Other researchers in psychology, like Herskovits (1970), have approached it from a developmental perspective. The focus is on unconscious learning during the early years, which does not sit well with the construct of culture as a dynamic living process where individuals make conscious choices to learn, unlearn, and relearn cultural norms and values at different stages in their life. However, it provides a good starting point to move away from acculturation because […] enculturation is primarily an anthropological concept. It is a construct, a process in the behavioral sense that delineates the dynamics of transmission and transmutation of culture throughout human growth. Cultural transmission is the process of acquiring the traditionally inherited culture; cultural transmutation, on the other hand, is a process of psychosocial transmutation, through deliberate, reflective, functional, yet occasionally incidental processes of teaching and learning. Enculturation, thus, involves innovation and inquiry which is a particular type of epistemological sensitivity to culture. (Shimahara 1979:148-149) 36 If acculturation involves shedding one’s culture and leaving behind some or all the values, norms, and beliefs of one’s original culture, then enculturation involves the cognitive process of learning the values, norms, and beliefs of the other culture in addition to those of one’s own culture. This is especially true in the case of second and subsequent generations of the diaspora. They first enculturate the U.S. culture outside of their home, unlike their parents who have first enculturated their home culture and subsequently the American culture upon their arrival to the U.S. Thus, enculturation is a much better-suited concept and is more expansive and integrative in comparison to the pure constructionist approach of acculturation. It must be noted that Berry’s model of acculturation has evolved significantly since its initial conception. However, it remains deficient in terms of the type of immigrants, their successive generations, and the challenges of globalization, further leading to cultural hybridity. Furthermore, Segall et al. (1999) have defined acculturation as the extent to which immigrants adopt and practice the cultural norms of the mainstream while continuing to maintain and adhere to the cultural norms of their own culture. This conceptualization is a slight improvement over the former, but it does not explain the process in second and subsequent generation immigrants born in the U.S (Alamilla et al. 2017). On the other hand, enculturation involves the maintenance of and adherence to multiple beliefs and values without the idea of completely giving up one’s own culture in favor of the dominant group’s culture. The need for enculturation in the age of globalization has been studied from an intercultural communication perspective (Pruskus 2013), from a bicultural marketing perspective (Korzenny et al. 2017), and a global media consumption culture perspective (Choi 2002) by many scholars. It has also been argued that “[l]inguistic identity of language emerges only gradually, by means of the child’s increasingly competent participation in the discursive processes of reflexive enculturation” (Taylor 2010:14). Finally, the impact of enculturation on moral relativism positively increases tolerance and reduces intercultural tensions (Rezan 2008) and in child development where the child is enculturated and enculturating cultural concepts in social interactions throughout the course of its development (Vinden 2004). In conclusion, we can safely agree that cultural identity is no longer fixed and absolute. It is constructed across differences through memory, fantasy, narrative, and myth within the framework of spatio-temporal realities. In a way, “cultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made within the discourses of history and culture” (S. Hall 1990:226). The past is inevitably present in the construction and experience of identity, but this is not a fixed, ‘factual’ past. There is a relation to this past, and the diasporic individuals engage in constant negotiation with it, thereby playing a vital role in the reconstruction of cultural identity in the adopted homeland. It is in migration, a shift in place and culture, that the fluid, flexible, and fractal nature of the construction of identity is more apparent. Identity is thus a “continually constituted and reconstructed category, a process of becoming which entails not a fixed position but positionality and locations” (Naficy 1991:298). The fluidity of experience in constructing identity between the past and present, the imagined, desired and the real and contemporary, unfolds unconsciously in the larger ideological framework of the state, religion, and society. These regulate and provide static and fixed boundaries to the multiplicity and fractality of diasporic experience. It is finally the state that largely determines the experience of the diaspora both in the context of departure and settlement. However, in the postcolonial world, the imperial forces tried to control the colonial subjects, imposing categories and identities to fix the imperial “others,” only to be met with refracted images that fully subverted and undermined the imposed identities. If hierarchical, vertical impositions of identity failed in the colonial world, it’s hard to imagine that they would work in the West's modern “internal colonies” (Bhabha 1994). Therefore, 37 I have provided a background on the sociological realities in which the authors and literary works selected for this research are situated and the factors that act as negative and positive determinants to identity construction. The next chapter provides a more nuanced view of the South Asian American diaspora and critical characteristics of the type of literature published by diasporic authors. 38 1.2 Changing Face of the South Asian American Diaspora and their Literature in the Twenty-First Century If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth I The U.S. has the highest number of immigrants than any other country globally. It is estimated that about one-fifth of the world’s migrants live in the U.S. It is home to about 44 million immigrants, out of which 22 million are from Asia. Among these, there are six million South Asian 9 immigrants (four million Indian Americans, seven hundred thousand Pakistani Americans, one hundred and eighty-five thousand Bangladeshi Americans), making them the third-largest immigrant group in the U.S. after Mexicans and Chinese immigrants (United States Census Bureau). By race and ethnicity, more Asian immigrants than Hispanic immigrants have arrived in the U.S. in most years since 2010. Asians are projected to become the largest immigrant group in the U.S. by 2055, surpassing Hispanics (Pew Research Center). Despite their growing presence in the U.S., immigrants from South Asia have not been fairly represented in America’s history. People from South Asia have lived in the U.S. since the 1700s, but they achieved significant numbers only from the late 1800s. The early settlers were primarily from Punjab and Bengal, Sikhs and Muslims, respectively, who started forming communities in the states along the Pacific coast. Like immigrants from other countries, South Asians faced their usual share of discrimination and violence. Still, things gradually changed after the Luce-Celler Act was passed in 1946, and the community established its presence in the hospitality, medical, and technology sectors in the 50s and 60s. Following the abolition of immigration quotas in 1965, the American landscape started to see a further increase in immigrants from South Asia, and this time most of them who entered 9 “South Asia” as a constructed category is often used as a strategic geopolitical or geographical term indicating political alliances, both in Asia and the diasporas, and the term is one that can configure social identities and categories without necessarily alluding to national identities. It is not to be taken as a term designating an object of study, as does area studies, but rather as designating a constructed geopolitical region with interlinked political economies and histories, a subject of study. Nevertheless, it is important to recognize the ambivalent function of the term; although South Asia provides opportunity to analyze the region because of its interconnected history, politics, and economics, it is also imagined as a homogenous community from an “external” (often Western) point of view. Unfortunately, discussions of India dominate the study and meaning of South Asia in most (inter)disciplinary scholarship and (identity) politics. The framework of “South Asian” can reflect a liberal Euro-American discourse that views the region as a homogenous monocultural area in which an Orientalized version of India represents South Asia. Thus, strategically identifying oneself or one’s politics as “South Asian” can create, though does not ensure, meaningful alliances within certain contexts. Nation-states such as Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and Bangladesh, and Indian minorities, including Muslims and Sikhs, as well as subaltern groups, offer multiple points to deconstruct not only the dominant national but also the Indian normative and multiple points from which to configure South Asia. Historical contexts have produced multiple oppressions and conflicts through the concept of religious differences within and between nations. In other words, the term needs to be unpacked to understand the complex relations of power that operate to consolidate a singular Hindu Indian construction of South Asia (Desai 2004:5). 39 the U.S. were highly qualified professionals. South Asians have established their presence gradually over more than three centuries and now comprise up to four generations of immigrants that are constantly enriching the American demographic landscape (South Asian American Digital Archive). Among these are small-scale business owners and entrepreneurs who run motels and general stores, high-tech innovators who have changed the face of Silicon Valley, and artists and entertainers who are becoming increasingly visible in mainstream American media. From food to music to movies to literature, South Asians have achieved success and fame in all sectors of American society. However, the term “immigrants” does not seem to do justice to the multiple generations and millions of South Asians who call the U.S. home. Instead, the term “diaspora” or “diasporic individual” in the sense of a group of people who share a common ethnic or heritage identity, those who have voluntarily or involuntarily settled in the U.S., those who are descendants of the erstwhile emigrants and are still interested in maintaining a connection with their ancestral homeland, and those digital nomads leading transient, circular transnational lives, more accurately describes the present-day populations of South Asian Americans. However, it is essential to distinguish between the political use of the term ‘diaspora’ and its conceptual meaning as exile. Due to global market forces, changes in population flows are markedly different from earlier forms of permanent exile (Ong 2003). The terms ‘diasporic communities’ and ‘global ethnoscapes’ have been used by Appadurai (1996) to refer to migrant communities, and they help to contextualize the tension between ‘cultural homogenization’ and ‘cultural heterogenization.’ These communities, groups, and individuals inhabit ‘imagined worlds,’ that is, “the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of people spread across the globe” who are able to “contest and sometimes even subvert the imagined worlds of the official mind” (Appadurai 2010:31). However, the term ‘diasporic communities’ indicates a ‘homogeneous’ group of individuals with similar ‘imaginaries’ who seek to influence state policies and programs in a similar way (Ong 2003). Therefore, ‘diaspora’ no longer refers to permanent exile but includes the range and diversity of transnational communities worldwide and articulates an inclusive global ethnicity for disparate populations. The term has also been extended to accommodate a “wide range of fluid, spatial, cultural and political locations” (Walsh 2003:3). This emphasis on the transnational leads us to our focus on identity, its construction, and the experiences of the South Asian American Muslim diaspora in the context of this shifting and fluid malleability of borders, locations, and positions. In terms of non-Western religious affiliation, the majority of South Asians mainly practice Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism. While some cultural practices like dress, yoga, and vegetarian food are specific to a section of South Asians, namely, the Hindus, the other cultural traditions related to music, movies, family dynamics, and literature transcend religious and geographical borders. Further, in the case of South Asia, religion plays a vital role in the ideology of nation. This religious nationalism is a colonial legacy of the British (Thapar et al. 2010), and it is also very highly visible in the South Asian diaspora (Veer 1995, 2015). Their country of origin shapes the lives of all diasporic individuals from the subcontinent, which is equally true for Muslim immigrants. Specifically, in the case of Muslim immigrants from Bangladesh and, by extension, from other Muslim Asian countries, Islam exerts a powerful and multidimensional influence (Kibria 2011). However, it should be noted that the cultural practices of South Asian Muslims are heavily influenced by their geographical neighbors in the subcontinent, which sets them apart from Arab Muslims. After September 11, 2001, it seems appropriate to highlight the uniqueness and diversity of the Muslim diaspora from the subcontinent, especially from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Furthermore, it is essential to distinguish them from their Arab counterparts regarding religious 40 ideology and draw parallels with their Hindu counterparts regarding their cultural traditions, norms, and practices. South Asian Muslims present a unique blend of cultural hybridity, affecting their worldview and identity deeply. And although Muslims do not constitute a race, they experience a type of ascribed racism from which their Hindu counterparts are exempt. South Asians have a fascinating and unique history in terms of their migration to the U.S., and the racialization of their religious identity heavily impacts the essence of the South Asian Muslim diaspora. Consequently, this changes the social location of South Asian Muslims by pushing them further away from the center and compromising their status as American citizens along the way (Selod 2018). Furthermore, in the wake of 9/11, there is a growing trend of primacy in the assertion of religious identity over other forms of social identities in Muslim Americans (Peek 2005). So, it becomes essential for us to study the impact of Islam on the South Asian Muslim diaspora and their identity in particular as we continue to progress in the twenty-first century. Migration has been a natural phenomenon throughout human history. Unlike dispersion in the plant and animal kingdom, human migration involves much more than the mere physical movement of people. Migrants carry with them a predefined social identity. In the case of the South Asian diaspora, given the internal diversity of the region, this social identity is complex and hard to compartmentalize. What separates the South Asian and South Asian Muslim diasporic individuals from their other Asian counterparts is the diversity and complexity of their religious beliefs and cultural practices, which are so central to their “being” and to the process of their “becoming”; their norms and values regarding family and kinship and their plethora of pan-ethnic 10 differences. These socio-cultural aspects are so diverse that they have resulted in the fragmentation of the South Asian diaspora into diasporic communities divided by religions and languages. Indians (and the same holds for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, given their close geographical and social proximity) tend to recreate the social structure wherever they go. They tend to hold on to their native culture, and their mode of adaptation has a clear preference for economic integration more than cultural assimilation (Sharma 1989). Furthermore, the circumstances and timing of migration are also important factors to consider in the formation of identity amongst diasporic individuals. The large-scale and steady emigration of skilled professionals from South Asian countries to the West is a recent phenomenon, especially in the 1960s and 1970s in the wake of the liberalization of the U.S. immigration policy. While this type of emigration has been largely referred to as ‘brain drain’ in India and other South Asian countries, it is “essentially voluntary and mostly individual in nature” (Jayaram 2004:22). With the emergence of second and thirdgeneration diasporic individuals enjoying increased economic prosperity and better sociocultural rights in the U.S., the study of their identity formation takes on new dimensions. While the firstgeneration diasporic individuals who are naturalized U.S. citizens tend to hold on to their South Asian roots firmly, the American-born second-and-subsequent generations have shown evidence of ambivalence as apparent in the literary representation of the lives of South Asian American Muslims in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. There is no denying that there is a great deal of intergenerational cultural conflict present among this diaspora in the U.S., with the most 10 Panethnicity is a term coined by Espiritu (1992) to describe groups based on common characteristics such as race, ethnicity, religion, geographical and cultural origin. While the term was used in the anti-colonial and national freedom movements in the mid-twentieth centuries, it was Espiritu who popularized the concept in the context of Asian American diaspora to bring together very diverse cultural and ethnic groups who only had one similarity, in that they were from the continent of Asia, but more specifically to the geographical regions referred to as the Far East. The term can be extended to the South Asian American diaspora as well, because, just like their East Asian counterparts, South Asians too do not belong to a single ethnolinguistic or racial group, and yet share similarities amongst themselves, similarities that distinguish South Asians from remaining Asians. 41 common factor being the practice of Islam and the religious rituals and cultural traditions associated with it. So, it is imperative to research this dimension when analyzing identarian development in the literary fiction created by these diasporic individuals and their portrayal of the transcultural imagination. In late modernity, a distinct feature of the diaspora is that the diasporic individual is no longer cut off from their ancestral homeland. Thanks to communication technologies and modern transportation, it is now possible for diasporic individuals to be virtually and physically connected to their multiple homelands. Electronic communication systems offer an opportunity to the diasporic communities to produce new identities, and they are using different means to achieve this (Mitra 2002). However, this shift between the U.S. and the heritage homeland may also be seen as unfavorable and as South Asians not trying to assimilate or integrate fully into their adopted culture. The following questions could be raised: ... do the Asians create their own difficulties by their own way of life, and by remaining separate from the host society, or do their troubles arise mainly from excess of chauvinism or racism in the country of their adoption? Do they offend because they are, visibly, both pariahs and exploiters in alien societies? Or are they scapegoats, singled out for victimization because their adopted country (or its government) needs an alibi for poor performance in the national sphere? (Tinker 1977:138-139) While globalization encourages the free movement of skilled labor, it has also resulted in a power struggle both within the diasporic communities and the dominant groups. As pointed out earlier, South Asian diasporic individuals tend to preserve their identity in the cultural and religious domains; that is, they remain Indian or Pakistani, or Bangladeshi in their primary groups but act Americanized in their secondary groups (Saran 1985); while in the economic domain they are quick to integrate (Gordon 1987). As South Asians prosper economically in the U.S., they are asserting their American citizenship rights and at the same time strengthening their voice through academic research 11 , political involvement 12 , and boardroom prowess 13 . The complexity of the process, the multiple and heterogeneous backgrounds of this diaspora, and the differential experiences of various South Asian sub-groups make it challenging to analyze the formation of diasporic identity and the politics surrounding it. Citing the case of South Asian American literature in the contemporary era, Srikanth and Song (2016) contest: The space between literary and social worlds grows thin, and the two worlds may even intimately intrude upon each other, when what becomes identified as literature is inextricably linked with a political context. Such is the case with Asian American literature, which has unavoidable political origins and makes only incomplete sense without an understanding of these extraliterary beginnings. (3) Keeping in mind the above observation, all literary works discussed in this study are analyzed from an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing from sociology, politics, literary studies, and even mathematics. 11 See the extensive list of South Asians that form the SAADA Academic Council which is a community of scholars committed to furthering the academic study of South Asians in the U.S. through supporting the work of the South Asian American Digital Archive (saada.org/academiccouncil). 12 See the report by Mehta (2021) published on “FiveThirtyEight” on the detailed statistics of South Asian American participation in mainstream U.S. politics (fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-south-asian-americans-tap-into-their-community-to-kick-start-their-political-careers/) and the recent success story of Zohran Mamdani and Jenifer Rajkumar’s election to the New York State Assembly in 2020, a city that is home to more than 300,000 South Asian Americans (nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/new-york-elects-first-south-asian-americans-state-assembly-n1245860). 13 See the list of South Asian CEOs of U.S. companies at startuptalky.com/south-asian-ceo/, an analysis of the “bamboo ceiling” phenomenon at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) (www.pnas.org/content/117/9/4590), and research about Hi-Tech South Asians by Professor G, William Domhoff, from the sociology department of University of California at Santa Cruz (whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/diversity_update_2020.html). 48 The history of South Asian American literature is relatively recent; the creative energy of the immigrant generation and the rising number of second-generation writers in the United States promise to shape narratives and images about experiences as diverse as those of Bangladeshi cabdrivers in Washington, D.C., motel owners in the deep South, dotcom entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley, and filmmakers in New York City. South Asian Americans, with their heterogeneous ethnic, linguistic, national, and socioeconomic spaces, are ready to be imaginatively rendered in their myriad complexity. (48) Srikanth (2006) discusses the transnational and transcultural nature of South Asian American literature, which complicates existing conceptualizations of space, citizenship, and allegiance in literary narratives from this region as they straddle across multiple physical and cultural homelands. Writing in the cultural, sociopolitical backdrop of the twenty-first century and the more recent events surrounding 9/11, one of Srikanth’s (2006) primary objectives is to highlight the shift in South Asian diaspora literature in America from postcolonial studies to ethnic studies. She sees South Asian American literature “as providing the means to pull back from a close-up view of the United States to reveal a wider landscape of other nations and other peoples (2006:4), further arguing that “[s]uch enlargement of perspective is a moral responsibility, particularly in the twenty-first century, when no nation is an island unto itself” (2006:4). The literary works produced by South Asian American writers in the twenty-first century move beyond the conventional notions of family, religion, nationality, and sexuality, and break free from the socalled orientalist portrayal of South Asians, particularly Muslims, instead placing the secondgeneration literary subject in a co-owned American civic space. Describing the nature of emerging works by such contemporary authors, Srikanth observes that “[t]he most satisfying South Asian American writing seeks to escape ‘the grammar of expectancy,’ both by presenting the reader with a complex landscape of indeterminate unpredictability and by challenging the reader to withhold summary explanation” (2006:12). Furthermore, in the case of Muslim American literature from authors tracing their roots to Pakistan, Bangladesh, and India, Sudhakar (2018) argues that both fictional and non-fictional narratives spanning all genres ranging from the paradigmatic 9/11 novel to the bildungsroman, including plays and memoirs, posit not only a critique of Islamophobia in the U.S., but at the same time also offer stories for building solidarity across faith, race, and nation. In this regard, Srikanth rightly asserts that “[w]e often forget or take for granted that the writer enriches, deepens, and widens our understanding of complex situations” (2006: 28). The growing list of South Asian Muslim American authors from non-academic and non-literary backgrounds and from within the established academy reveals the changing nature of narratives produced in the twenty-first century. While it is true that some South Asian American works contain ideas “which often sell well, include the patriarchal nature of particular communities; intergenerational strife; identity confusion; the prevalence of arranged marriage; and the need for flight from a benighted, Orientalized South Asian motherland” (Maxey 2012:214), the new generation of South Asian American writers “explore the ideas mentioned above in a critical and nuanced fashion – which serves to energize and encourage other writers, examining different ideas, on both sides of the Atlantic” (Maxey 2012:215). The impressive list of literary prizes awarded to South Asian American writers in the last thirty years and their ability to engage readers from a cross-section of non-Asian American and global audiences is visible as these works appear in top-selling author lists in mainstream American and international media. Additionally, these works of life-writing and fiction offer role models to future generations of South Asian Americans, helping them find their place in the American literary landscape joining the diasporic wave in the coming years. Maxey (2012) argues: 49 Although some might contest the existence of such an imagined community, especially within the US, it remains the case that for those writers who perceive themselves as belonging to it, this community has the very real impact of creating increasingly complex literary genealogies which move across class, gender, national and ethnic boundaries. Its presence also suggests the continuing need to understand this writing within a transnational, and specifically a transatlantic, frame. (215) Non-Muslim writers from India such as Kiran Desai, Bharathi Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee, and Jhumpa Lahiri have dominated the scene of diasporic writing in the U.S. since the 1970s. They have won numerous literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, and their works have been published by mainstream American publishers. On the other hand, Muslim American writers from India are a handful, the most prominent among them being the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali who moved to the U.S. in 1976. An alumnus of the University of Arizona (MFA 1985) and Pennsylvania State University (Ph.D. in English 1984), A.S. Ali taught various courses on poetry and creative writing at universities in the U.S. He has published several poetry collections since the seventies on the themes of exile, the injustice in Kashmir, and Muslim American identity. A.S. Ali was mainly known for popularizing the Urdu poetic form called ghazal in American English and edited an anthology of English ghazals by American poets, Ravishing Disunities: Real Ghazals in English (2000). Except A.S. Ali, most Indian Muslim American writing in the U.S. was published after 2000. Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla is an Ismaili Indian American writer and filmmaker born in Kenya but later moved to Los Angeles. He has published two novels, the critically acclaimed Ode to Lata (2002), which won the 18th Annual American Book Award and was adapted into a film in 2007, and The Two Krishnas (2011). In both novels, Dhalla explores themes of American identity and sexuality, spanning three continents, and the impact of Islam on the lives of the gay protagonists and their families. Both novels portray affluent Muslim characters who are bankers and highlight the intersectionality between religion, gender, and identity in this category of South Asian Muslim Americans in the twenty-first century. Another American writer and activist of Indian origin is Samina Ali, best known for her debut novel Madras on Rainy Days, published in 2004 and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award in Fiction. She is the co-founder of the American Muslim feminist organization Daughters of Hajar and regularly blogs for The Huffington Post and Daily Beast, two major digital news aggregator platforms in the U.S. Like her activism work in real life, her novel provides an insight into the process of arranged marriage and women’s rights in the context of Islam. Set in Hyderabad, the story follows the life of a young Indian American girl who travels to India to get married only to discover that her husband is a closeted gay man. Like Dhalla’s The Two Krishnas (2011), S. Ali’s novel also conducts a detailed inquiry into the influence of Islamic rituals on second-generation Americans. It vividly portrays the relationship between Hindus and Muslims in India, alluding to the complex relationship between nation and religion. In this sense, all three writers above focus more on the background of the factors that color and form the South Asian part of its characters’ American identity or provide a metafictional account of the dilemmas of their lives in the ancestral homeland. In this shortlist of Muslim American writers of Indian origin is also Fatima Farheen Mirza, who was born in 1991 and raised in California. Currently the only second-generation author in this category, Mirza is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and spent almost a decade on her debut novel, A Place for Us. It is the first novel from Sarah Jessica Parker’s new imprint, SJP for Hogarth, published in 2018. The story follows the lives of three siblings from an affluent South Asian American family and is narrated from multiple viewpoints. Centered around a wedding in the U.S., the intergenerational struggle of children for finding a place in their own family and the homeland adopted by their parents is described through both perspectives. The novel also explores the impact 50 of 9/11 on the identities of its characters. It demonstrates the strategies used by each generation to negotiate their Muslim American processes of “being” and “becoming.” It is one of the first novels that attempt to unravel the complexity of what it means to be a Muslim and an American of Indian origin in the contemporary era. Novelists and playwrights from Pakistan are seen to dominate the category of South Asian Muslim American writing, partly because Islam is the majority religion in this part of South Asia and partly also because Pakistani Muslim American writers like Bapsi Sidhwa, most known for her novels Cracking India (1992) originally published as Ice Candy Man (1988), and Water (2006); and Sara Suleri, founding editor of the Yale Journal of Criticism (1989-2005) and author of Meatless Days (1989), have been well known globally since the 1980s. As discussed above, these authors write in English, but their themes are postcolonial in nature, dealing with the trauma of the Indo-Pakistan partition. One of the first writers to evoke the theme of Muslim American identity in the twenty-first century is Tahira Naqvi, whose collection of short stories Dying in a Strange County was published in 2001. Naqvi is an Associate Professor of Urdu at NYU and is most known for her prolific translations of the Indian Urdu writer Ismat Chugtai’s works into English. Her aforementioned short story collection is one of the earliest literary depictions on the subject of South Asian Muslim American identity. It lays the foundation for understanding the impact of Islam as a significant identity-building block. It is heavily centered on the firstgeneration’s experience in negotiating their processes of “being” and “becoming” hybrid Americans but also offers a brief opening into the future generation’s identity dilemmas and attempts to answer questions such as what it means to raise Muslim children in the U.S. in the twenty-first century. Furthermore, as is discussed throughout this dissertation, 9/11 has marked a turning point in the lives of all Muslim Americans and among their South Asian counterparts, but the impact has been felt the most by the Pakistan American diaspora hence Islamophobia and Islam are at the core of any work produced by many of these literary artists. In the group of second-generation Pakistani American writers, the most well-known is the playwright, novelist, and actor Ayad Akhtar born in New York in 1970 to a doctor couple. Educated at Brown (BA) and Columbia (MFA), A. Akhtar has penned four plays and two novels and has won several awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for his play Disgraced (2013). His latest novel Homeland Elegies (2020) was given the American Book award among other honors. Currently serving as the president of PEN America, A. Akhtar has extensively written from a second-generation perspective on the role of debt and its relationship with the American Dream and, by extension, American identity. He also writes on the relationship between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and his works contain a critique of Islam from both within and outside the Muslim community and the impact of 9/11 on the identity of South Asian Muslim Americans. His writing style blurs the lines between multiple genres and attempts to rationalize the Muslim debates in the U.S., driving it from the past of Islam’s Golden Age into the practical realities of life for Muslims in the West today. A. Akhtar is joined by the California-born Wajahat Ali, an English major from UC Berkley, a licensed attorney, a social sciences researcher, a reporter for leading U.S. newspapers, a playwright, and a novelist. W. Ali wrote and produced the play The Domestic Crusaders in 2005, published in the Fall of 2010, about an upper-middle-class Muslim-American family of Pakistani origin that deals with the notion of the individual “self,” the collective family, and societal constraints imposed by multiple cultures into the making of a South Asian Muslim American identity. In his memoir, Go Back to Where You Came from: And Other Helpful Recommendations on How to Become American (2022), he describes his experience growing up in the “margins of the American mainstream, devoid of Brown superheroes, where people like him 51 were portrayed as goofy sidekicks, shop owners with funny accents, sweaty terrorists, or aspiring sweaty terrorists” (W. Ali “Go back to where you came from, you terrorist”). W. Ali is not alone in his desire to “expand the American narrative to include protagonists who look like him” and who use their pen “to fill in missing narratives, challenge the powerful, and booby trap racist stereotypes” (W. Ali “Go back to where you came from, you terrorist”). The second-generation Pakistani American author and commentator Haroon Moghul’s memoir How to be a Muslim: An American Story (2017) provides a historical insight into Islam’s journey from seventh-century Arabia to twenty-first-century America. Moghul deals with the importance of having Muslim chaplains in American universities and highlights the stigma around mental health among South Asian Americans. His debut novel, The Order of Light (2008), follows the journey of a young Pakistani Muslim American student from the U.S. to Cairo to understand his faith in the setting of an Islamic country. Moghul investigates the age-old conflict between the East and West in the global context of late modernity and the impact of Islam on second-generation South Asian Muslim Americans. Two other writers stand out in the list of contemporary authors from the twenty-first century: Syed M. Masood and Ali Eteraz. S.M. Masood is a first-generation Pakistani American born in Karachi but currently living in California. He has graduate degrees in Law and English literature. He writes predominantly about second-generation Muslim Americans, and two of his young adult fiction novels, More than just a Pretty Face (2020) and Sway with Me (2021), have been published by Little, Brown and Company. The same publishing house has also published many works by A. Akhtar. His most notable work is The Bad Muslim Discount (2021) that provides a historical background to American occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the role of Pakistan in this global conflict. The novel depicts the physical and psychological journeys of “being” and “becoming” across three continents and multiple generations and cultures with characters from all three countries. The narrative also presents an intersectional view of life for affluent Muslim Americans and those with lesser financial means, including a look into Islam practiced by diverse Muslim denominations in the U.S. The story can be regarded as fractal in how it structurally alternates the voices of the characters: masculine versus feminine, first-generation versus secondgeneration, legal immigrant versus refugee, affluent versus poor. Furthermore, the female protagonist changes her nominal identity as she moves between countries signaling a fractal identity. Her present identity is constituted of fragments from her past that are impossible to discard despite changing her name. It offers a look into the trauma of displacement, making it a matter-offact way of living and survival, ultimately ending in a message of hope. As for Ali Eteraz, he was born in Pakistan and has lived in the Persian Gulf and the Caribbean, currently residing in the U.S. He is a lawyer by profession and a writer by choice, most known for his memoir Children of Dust, published in 2011 by HarperCollins. Like Moghul and S.M. Masood, Eteraz also provides a historical background on Islam’s trajectory, particularly from Pakistan to America. The memoir is constructed circularly, divided into five books, where each book constitutes an essential fragment of the author’s fractal identity. Patterns are repeated unconsciously and what would be customarily dismissed as irregularities on the surface reveal multiple self-similar replicas of the constituent identities forming the writer’s present-day Muslim American identity. Eteraz’s debut novel Native Believer, published in 2016, tells the story of a second-generation immigrant in the backdrop of 9/11 who wants to raise his children as full-fledged Americans. Confronted with existential degradation and fed-up with being treated as a second-class citizen, the novel depicts the everyday experience for Muslim Americans and their struggle for shaping identity and forging belonging at all costs. 52 The female perspective is also well represented in literary narratives by contemporary Pakistani American women writers. Nafisa Haji, a second-generation Indo-Pak American, is a graduate of American History from UC Berkeley. Her novel The Writing on my Forehead (2010) is a transnational and transcultural tale of two sisters coming to terms with life and death in a post 9/11 U.S. The novel deals with the theme of the Indo-Pakistan partition, albeit from the perspective of what it means for the second-generation South Asian Muslim Americans. The intergenerational tale spanning three generations narrates parallel stories, each emphasizing the burdens of past legacy on the characters’ “being” and the dilemmas of their future “becoming” while exposing multiple journalistic viewpoints about the September 11 attacks. Sehba Sarwar is a first-generation Pakistani American born in Karachi but educated in Texas. She is the co-founder and co-director of Voices Breaking Boundaries 18 , a non-profit multi-media arts organization that aims to create social change through art. Her novel Black Wings (2004) provides an account of rural Pakistan as deftly as it portrays life for a migrant family in America. This is an intergenerational tale, written in the form of chapters alternating between the perspective of the visiting Pakistani grandmother who represents the ancestral homeland and the American mother who represents the adopted homeland, connecting the children’s past, present, and future. The narrative style is almost fractal because it juxtaposes the views of two generations only to realize how deeply connected they are and how one influences the other. Like Naqvi, Sarwar’s is also predominantly a first-generation perspective that does not focus on the 9/11 events but helps us understand life in post-partition Pakistan and how it alters the life of future generations in twentieth-century America and beyond. Several other works by notable women writers like the Chicago-based Asma Gull Hasan’s critical analysis of American Muslims with biographical elements in Red, White, and Muslim: My Story of Belief (2009), Washington-based Maliha Masood’s travel memoirs Zaatar Days, Henna Nights (2007) and Dizzy in Karachi (2013), the comic book editor and co-creator of the first Muslim American female comic character, Sana Amanat’s Ms. Marvel (2014) series, and Shaila Abdullah’s Saffron Dreams (2010) have also contributed to the field of South Asian Muslim American literature. There are fewer Bangladeshi American writers than Pakistani and even Indian American writers. One of them is Rumaan Alam, who grew up in an upper-middle-class Bangladeshi American family in an affluent suburb of Washington D.C. and writes exclusively about the mainstream non-South Asian American experience, which sets him apart from other diasporic writers. In 1997 when The New Yorker published a special fiction issue dedicated to Indian writers, Alam decided he did not want to be niche because “it underscored the way in which an Establishment that judges what fiction is will always append that modifier,” and instead he wanted to succeed at a game he did not devise but whose rules he was able to read and internalize” (Shapiro 2020, “Delusions of Whiteness”). His latest novel, Leave the World Behind (2020), a finalist for the National Book Award in the U.S., will be adapted into a film by Netflix 19 . In the list of other diasporic writers, Tanwi Nandini Islam is a second-generation Bangladeshi American writer and founder of a Brooklyn-based perfume company called Tanaïs. She was born in Illinois and raised in different parts of the U.S., including the Midwest and South. With a background in social justice and an MFA, her debut novel Bright Lines published in 2015, was named a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, shortlisted for the Brooklyn Eagles Literary Prize, and the Edmund White Award for debut fiction. The novel is set in 2003 Brooklyn with references to the area in 18 For more details, see https://www.vbbarts.org. 19 For more details, see https://deadline.com/2020/07/netflix-julia-roberts-denzel-washington-sam-esmail-leave-theworld-behind-auction-rumaan-alam-novel-1202989464/. 53 the nineties and explores a cross-section of diverse lives and narratives from this borough of New York. In a way, each character in the novel is searching for a home, in the literal and the figurative sense. The narrative also explores queerness and surprises the reader by not attaching the usual religious prejudices associated with sexuality. It is an example of a transcontinental and transgenerational narrative written from the particular to the universal. It explores the journeys of all the people living in an American urban neighborhood from all types of economic backgrounds, not just the lives of its Muslim protagonists. The themes covered in Islam’s novel also set her apart from other diasporic writers because they do not exclusively contain Muslim American characters but figures from the entire cross-section of American immigrants. Nevertheless, Islam provides a detailed historical and political background on the making of Bangladesh and its subsequent independence from Pakistan. We also have Dilruba Ahmed, a second-generation Bangladeshi American poet who has won several awards and whose works have been published in several prestigious American journals and anthologies 20 . She represents the duality of her experiences in Bangladesh and America that are hard to categorize. She portrays the difficulties of being Muslim and American in the twenty-first century. Like A.S. Ali, D. Ahmed has also written many English ghazals that are included in her poetry collections, elucidating both transcultural and fractal aspects of belonging and identity in the contemporary era. If A.S. Ali’s is a male perspective on longing for the forgotten homeland, then D. Ahmed’s is a feminine perspective on religion’s impact and consequences on the processes of “being” and “becoming” in the adopted homeland. Other Bangladeshi American authors like the writer and professor Sharbari Zohra Ahmed’s collection of short stories The Ocean of Mrs. Nagai (2013) depicts the life of Bangladeshi American characters from Hell’s Kitchen in New York City, and like Islam, S.Z. Ahmed’s debut novel Dust Under Her Feet (2019) provides a historical background on Bangladesh during World War II. Incidentally, S.Z. Ahmed is also one of the writers for ABC’s thriller drama Quantico starring Priyanka Chopra, an Indian American actress in the lead role. The latest to join the list of diasporic authors among Bangladeshi Americans is the young fiction writer Tashie Bhuiyan 21 , whose debut novel Counting Down with You (2021) and the upcoming novel A Show for Two (2002), both published by Inkyard Press at HarperCollins are based in New York, narrate the lives of Bangladeshi teenagers that readers from similar backgrounds can identify with. Reviewing Bhuiyan’s debut novel, Monamee sums up the experience of all South Asian American readers when she observes that the novel: was like a mirror to my soul. For the first time, I felt seen as a reader and could relate to the things the protagonist was feeling. From the rich descriptions of Bangladeshi food to small things like the Muslim intonations in the protagonist's speech, all of it made me feel like the story was for once about me. (2021 “The teenage life of a Bangladeshi-American”) As mentioned before, there are no Muslim American writers from other South Asian countries like Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, and Sri Lanka who have published literary works in the U.S., partially because apart from Sri Lanka, all countries are predominantly Hindu or Buddhist. Among the non-Muslims, there are some Sri Lankan American literary writers, such as the firstgeneration poet-diplomat, essayist, and multilingual figure Indran Amirthanayagam 22 , who writes in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Haitian Creole, and whose poems have been published in leading American reviews. His poetry collection The Elephants of Reckoning (1993) won the Paterson Poetry prize in 1994. The New York Times best-selling author of historical 20 For a brief biography and notable works, see https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/dilruba_ahmed. 21 For a brief biography and notable works, see https://www.tashiebhuiyan.com. 22 For a brief biography and notable works, see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/indran-amirthanayagam. 54 romance novels, Rosemary Rogers, is Sri Lankan American. There is also Mary Anne Mohanraj, a Sri Lankan American writer, editor, and academician, currently teaching in the English department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who writes on cultural identity and sexuality and is the co-founder of the speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons. We also have Sunil Yapa 23 , the biracial second-generation Sri Lankan American author, whose debut novel Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (2016) centered around the events of the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, has won several awards and recommendations from leading American top-selling lists. To sum up, in the words of Srikanth (2006), given the growing influence of South Asians in America’s economic, cultural, and sociopolitical landscapes, an ambitious goal of American writers tracing their roots to the subcontinent is to reassert their presence and re-represent their identities themselves: Consider whether there would be any circumstances under which an individual in the United States would train him/herself to take on a South Asian or South Asian American persona. It seems unlikely, given the reality that there is no pressing need to do so. So it falls to South Asian American literature to supply the narratives and images that are compelling enough to make readers in the United States aware of the gaps in their consciousness, and intriguing enough to move them to fill these gaps by reading with care and living with vision. (33) In the remaining chapters of Part One of the dissertation, two novels, and one memoir have been analyzed to discuss the literary representations of South Asian Muslim Americanness and belonging; debt, race, and social structuration in late modernity; identity as epistemo-ontology and the usefulness of ethnoconvergence for interfaith dialog; and the integration of South Asian Muslim Americans across temporal and spatial boundaries. 23 For a brief biography and notable works, see http://sunilyapa.com. 55 1.3 Depictions of South Asian Muslim Americanness, Belonging, Debt, and Race in Ayad Akhtar’s Homeland Elegies I wouldn’t see it until our private lives had consumed the public space, then been codified, foreclosed, and put up for auction; until the devices that enslave our minds had filled us with the toxic flotsam of a culture no longer worthy of the name; until the bright pliancy of human sentience—attention itself—had become the world’s most prized commodity, the very movements of our minds transformed into streams of unceasing revenue for someone, somewhere. Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies Ayad Akhtar’s latest novel, Homeland Elegies (HE), published in 2020, is partly autobiographical and partly fictional, blurring the lines between literary genres, just like the hybrid identities of today’s diasporic individuals who inhabit multiple homelands. It reflects the state of political and economic affairs in the U.S. in the last fifty years from the viewpoint of a secondgeneration South Asian Muslim American. The novel raises important questions about race, belonging, intergenerational struggles, debt, Islamophobia, and the meaning of the American dream for racial, ethnic, and religious minority groups. It is neither entirely autobiographical, nor autofiction, neither pure fiction nor pure reality. Inspired by Philip Roth’s writing style, A. Akhtar has deliberately chosen to insert himself into the storyline and characters based on his firstgeneration American parents and several other non-Asian characters, ranging from Donald Trump to Black republicans. The literary form resembles a symphony leading to a new kind of writing style for the genre of novels, just like there is a shift in the definition of what constitutes the American dream for the non-white naturalized citizens. A. Akhtar is unequivocally claiming his place in the American literary canon and writes from the perspective of the “non-other” American. The overture is a lament on the state of affairs in the author’s native soil, America. The three acts are written from the perspective of belonging, debt, and race in America. The coda describes what has become of the American dream and whose dream it is today. As Wang (2017) offers: The “other” has gained a voice, but only continuously explaining, qualifying, and making sense of itself. The dense hermeneutics of context-explaining takes up much of the space necessary for the real dialogue required by any ambitiously speculative and interdisciplinary artistic practices operating outside the Euro-American epistemological comfort zone. More insidious is the continued prevalence of self-exoticizing art practices with built-in, bite-size, self-explanatory mechanisms. (7) An alumnus of Brown and Columbia universities in the U.S. and currently serving as the president of PEN America, A. Akhtar is an American playwright, novelist, and screenwriter who came into the limelight when he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2013 for his play Disgraced. He was born in Staten Island, New York City, where his parents moved in the seventies, but was raised in Milwaukee. His writing is informed by his own experience growing up as a Muslim American and is heavily influenced by the Jewish American immigrant journey. His plays and novels incorporate a critique of the current state of Islam from the point of view of religion and religiosity, both within and outside the Muslim community. There is also an overt presence of money, more specifically debt, and its relationship to the American dream for immigrants as a recurring theme in his works. The Economist (2015) has reported that his literary works “are as essential today as the work of Saul Bellow, James Farrell, and Vladimir Nabokov were in the 20th 56 century in capturing the drama of the immigrant experience.” A. Akhtar has explained in an indepth interview with Cathy Park Hong (2020), the renowned Korean American poet, that his writing is not primarily about the discrimination faced by Muslims in America but about Muslims as American citizens seeking equal opportunities. He writes from a “particular” to a “universal,” and HE is a provocative book rather than a coming-of-age novel that raises important questions about the oppositional forces at play in the late capitalism era that goes beyond racial injustice. The novel is written in a live-reality television-show style form that constantly keeps the reader on the edge as they scroll through the narrative in an Instagram-style story format. A. Akhtar reflects on “Homeland” in its three different nuances, the land considered as home by first-generation Americans, the multiple homelands inhabited by his own generation, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security created in response to the 9/11 attacks, which changed the lives of Muslim Americans drastically in every sphere of American society. Through the voice of various characters, A. Akhtar attempts to explain why immigration and Islam are not the problems plaguing the American economy. For one such character, Riaz Rind, “[t]he current of anger growing across the world has nothing to do with immigration, he believed but was all about the System that debt had created, an inescapable, asymmetrical, transnational force” (HE 154). In this chapter, I analyze the identarian process from the viewpoints of belonging across borders for Muslim Americans, the meaning of the American dream fueled by the economic status that has resulted in plunder and pillage of the homeland, and the place of Islam in twenty-first-century America. Globalization, on the one hand, has resulted in the shrinking of borders. On the other hand, it has turned the cosmopolitan centers of political and economic powers into a permanent borderland, rife with conflicts over claims to nation, identity, and belonging. “Thus, while globalization’s open markets facilitate the exchange of goods and information and stimulate the movement of people to new places, its closed borders restrict human mobility through intensified policing of reinforced geopolitical boundaries” (Mendez and Naples 2015:6). In the case of second-generation descendants of naturalized citizens, there is an increased assertion of rights and a demand for accountability from the State concerning their place and status in the country of their birth. Having been born and raised in the U.S., the children of immigrants embrace Western education systems and lifestyles. With more similarities than differences with the mainstream population, their cultural identity differs in many ways from their first-generation parents. With an immigration history of almost four generations, the South Asian American Diaspora can be regarded as “American” as their Caucasian and Black counterparts. However, despite the significant contributions of diasporic individuals to the socioeconomic spheres, we see that governments in the Global North are imposing stricter border controls on their citizens whose heritage culture is Islamic. “Citizenship becomes, in the Foucauldian sense, a technology of government to regulate the very rights, access and ability to be and become mobile within an increasingly global and neoliberal economy” (Rygiel 2014:142). Although the U.S. has been a country of immigrants, through its different waves of European settlements, it is still considered a young nation-state where migration is a continuous reality in people’s lives. While the physical border in the U.S. is constantly under political and economic pressure, the ability of its naturalized citizens to easily move between multiple homelands renders the psychological conception of the border as ever-shifting and permeable. “Borders are multidimensional phenomena, with intricate complexities that reflect the deeper nature of the relations between the states that they divide” (Hart 2011:333). In a culturally complex country such as the U.S., any attempt at a homogeneous American identity is futile, and using 57 historical approaches to assimilation will result in a complete failure for its non-Caucasian citizens. A. Akhtar draws attention to the myth of assimilation in the U.S. and questions the legitimacy of the melting pot. He claims it is impossible to think about a singular American culture when its citizens today are made to question their roots every day because they are not from the right place, don’t have the right skin color, and who dare to look at the same things in entirely different ways. “They call it a melting pot, but it’s not. In chemistry, they have a buffer solution—which keeps things together but always separated. That’s what this country is. A buffer solution” (HE 319-320). A. Akhtar offers a detailed commentary on the problem facing the U.S. today through diverse characters like Riaz Rind, a second-generation Muslim American democrat of Pakistani origin, and Mike Jacobs, a black libertarian Republican who grew up in Alabama. He draws a parallel between what has historically happened with Blacks and what is happening with Muslims today. A. Akhtar comments that before 9/11, Americans did not know where he and his family came from, but after that fateful Tuesday, the only place they could have come from was somewhere bad. The discrimination of Blacks was not purely racial but also economical. In the post-civil rights movement era, White Americans “saw the rising tide of racial diversity and its economic and political consequences; they were plotting their response—a reassertion of white property rights, an accumulation of power in corporate hands to ensure that whites remained in charge” (HE 238). A. Akhtar then infers that immigration is less of a threat to political and economic stability in the U.S., and he offers a historical perspective on how the lust for money has replaced the pursuit for happiness, and that big structural changes are needed for the American dream to succeed. Through Riaz’s story, A. Akhtar draws our attention to the fact that the global issues facing the world today have nothing to do with immigration but more to do with the system of debt created by late capitalism. “For what grew now were not communities or economies but capital itself—and debt was the means, which meant it was also, now, the dominant cultural logic” (HE 154). Migration specialists argue that with so much racial and religious diversity, policies that give agency to citizens in reforming societal processes and structures without segregation in terms of race alone can help move from a multicultural to a transcultural society. Such policies advocate for the active and inclusive role of all cultural groups “in creating ever-new social expressions and structures; they study processual structures and structured processes as well as caesura, conflicts, and clashes” (Hoerder 2011:40). The field of border studies today aims at promoting a cultural politics of diversity and inclusion; however, “this work literally can be produced only by means of— can be founded only upon — exclusions” (Johnson and Michaelsen 1997:4). In the post-industrial U.S. crumbling under the burden of debt, race needs to be decoupled from class, and there is merit in viewing intergroup inequalities from the perspective of stratification economics. Economists like Darity, Hamilton, and Stewart (2005, 2010, 2015) argue that differences in human capital do not impact financial prosperity and cannot be used to explain the disparities in competitive market economies. These authors question the traditional American dream and the status of America as a land of opportunities where monetary gains are possible irrespective of the financial position of one’s family. Historically, minority groups in the U.S. have been at a disadvantage because their parents and grandparents do not have the same resources as those from the white classes, resulting in marked differences in wealth accumulation for people from non-white backgrounds. Riaz desires to become a billionaire and characterizes himself as a merchant of debt. But he is fully aware of his disadvantage amidst the structural disparities for minorities in the U.S. He argues that Capitalism in the West is based on the protection of assets from being redistributed after the 64 and interfaith dialog by separating Islam’s political, cultural, and religious aspects, tracing back its history across the world, and then placing it in the American context. Once he has deciphered what faith means for him, he acknowledges that it is impossible to separate it from his American identity. He declares, “[i]n just over a decade, I’d gone from an inelegant twenty-one-year-old, compelled by an act of terror to enter a public spotlight he was terrified by, to a man sure-footedly navigating a privileged world of pundits, politicos, policymakers” (HTBAM 1). In late modern societies, the rapport between structure and agency is no longer a one-way force, but both are interdependent actors in identity formation. Structuration is a widely studied theoretical construct from sociology, which helps redefine the relationship between the agency of human beings and the societal structure. As societies become increasingly diverse, material and cultural aspects of people’s lives no longer conform to the established norms and values of the hitherto dominant structures. However, as a child of immigrants but born and raised in the U.S., Western education becomes a starting point for Moghul to deconstruct his heritage: to view the Quran and the teachings of the prophet from a non-Arabian perspective. He narrates that, “[t]hrough the philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, I’d seek to better understand non-Western modernity; framed by thinkers like Koselleck, Foucault, and Chakrabarty, I’d explore how spatiality and temporality functioned in an Indo-Islamic contemporaneity” (HTBAM 1-2). Moghul presents this argument through a new historicism approach by providing an account of the spread of Islam from the Arabian Peninsula to the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia. He argues that through its global expansion between 650 to 1650 AD, Islam has adapted and adopted local cultural practices, indicating a feedback-feedforward approach rather than the misconception propagated by the current political and popular ideologies that still consider Islam to be a pre-modern religion. In this context, it should be noted that through his conceptualization of the habitus, Bourdieu has posited the dialectical relationship between internalizing the external and externalizing the internal, as external societal structures are incorporated within the “habitus,” and the exchanges between actors are externalized by the actions of the agent into social relationships. The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. (Bourdieu 1990:53) As Moghul explains, “[i]n Islam, death is not the end. Our expiration is our transition from this circumscribed world to a far more elaborate and enduring plane, grander or graver than the life we know now” (HTBAM, 8-9). The Islamic religious habitus 25 tends to extend beyond physical life, 25 It is interesting to expand the scope of habitus to include religion and religious practices. In the case of Islam, as discussed in Chapter 2.5, the eschatological belief among Muslims, that life in the material world extends beyond death into the spiritual world, leads us to investigate the influence of religion on habitus. Grusendorf (2016) discusses Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (and others ideas like field and capital) in the context of religion as representing a particular way of living. He posits that “[h]abitus is then to be understood as a part to play, a life to live, a role to be filled. Habitus is both informed by society as well as the very thing that informs society. Whether one holds to a generally informed agency or a specifically informed agency, it is important to note how habitus engages religion. (…) For some, this is a habitus in which they have grown from infancy to maturity. For others, it is a new habitus presented for consideration and possible adaptation by the human agent” (Grusendorf 2016:10). Other scholars like Mellor and Shilling (2014) have conceptualized a religious habitus built upon the principles of reflexivity and embodied subjectivity in late modernity. They argue that, “conceiving of the religious habitus as a series of reflexively informed acts involving the instauring of orientations towards the transcendent offers a distinctive basis upon which 65 yet it requires material actions in this world that help to ensure continuity in the afterlife. Moghul elaborates that “[t]he Qur’an opens with a vociferous condemnation of those who claim to follow Islam in public while deriding it in private. External adherence without internal conviction is the deepest deceit” (HTBAM 10). The importance attached to the rituals and their performance in daily life is a necessary condition for entry into the spiritual habitus. It can be inferred that diasporic individuals as agents are socialized in a “field” represented by the values, norms, and behaviors from their heritage and adopted cultures, where a series of hierarchical forms of “capital” such as their social standing, financial background, etc. are at stake. By accommodating the expected roles and desired relationships vis-à-vis their position in multiple homelands, the diasporic individuals internalize the processes necessary for operating in each cultural milieu. Over a period of time, these internalized relationships and habitual expectations constitute the “habitus.” In other words, diasporic individuals build strategies that are adapted to the expectations and realities of the plural identities they manifest and the multiple homelands they inhabit. It can also be derived that “habitus” for diasporic individuals does not solely operate at the level of discursive consciousness; rather it is considered an embodiment. For Muslim Americans, faith is embodied, whether they are practicing Muslims or not, and often works in a pre-reflexive manner, subconsciously governing all aspects of their lives. For Moghul, the identarian challenge of being a Muslim American lies in the balancing of “the repeated performance of Islam for the consumption of others” (HTBAM 11) versus the creation of an awareness about what he told people about who he was, or what they assumed he was, and what he was (not). The memoir takes us through his journey from faithlessness to self-realization and self-acceptance through a euphemistic condemnation of “talismanic Islam.” This term is coined by Moghul to denounce the orthodox form of Islam being practiced by some Muslims superficially as an external performative act as opposed to the internalization of the true meaning of Islam’s message. This is particularly relevant in the case of some South Asian Muslims who are swayed by the conservative Islam exported from the Middle East with claims that it is based on ancient scripture. Due to their lack of understanding of the Arabic language, Muslims from the subcontinent tend to believe such messages without critically questioning the political, social, and cultural intent of the regions where these messages have emanated and the ideologies of people who transmit these puritanical ideas. From his own experience, Moghul explains that in his childhood he “was a little clone of the obedient Muslim boy” (HTBAM 11), and he could “quote source text, from the letter of the law to the spirit of the argument” (HTBAM 11). However, there was no way for him to get answers to practical questions about everyday life in the U.S. He did not know any other Muslims from his age group and his parents’ acquaintances were easily swayed by a blanket dismissal of non-Muslims and their practices as anti-Islamic, based on what they heard in the social communities around them. While this may have worked for the first-generation, it seems to have resulted in a momentary loss of faith for someone like the second-generation Moghul, who then embarks on the journey to finding the balance between being an American, a Muslim, and a Muslim American. to assess its on-going significance today. It allows us to avoid any sense that religion is acquired and maintained merely through unthinking processes of acculturation or socialization that function to reproduce and legitimate social structures, or that it operates as a means for assimilation into ‘authoritative discursive traditions whose logic and power far exceeds the consciousness of the subjects they enable’ (Mahmood 2005, 32)” (Mellor and Shilling (2014:294). Also see Winchester (2008) for a discussion on embodying faith through religious practice and the creation of a Muslim moral habitus; and Naaman (2017) for a historical account of the idea of habitus from al-Fārābī through Ibn Khaldun to ʿAbduh, demonstrating the trends involved in the application of this sociological theory to religious discourse in Islam. 66 Furthermore, Bourdieu’s conceptualization of “disposition” can be used to strengthen the liminality in hybrid identities of diasporic individuals shaped by the prevailing structures and their own agency in the ontological development process. Dispositions are generally shared by people with similar backgrounds in a monocultural society, but they can also be acquired by diasporic individuals through mimesis. As a result, the established cultural norms and values change over time, influencing both individuals and their surroundings. However, there is an additional strain on marginalized populations because it is difficult to challenge the collectively and socially shaped mainstream institutions unless the minorities reach a critical mass. Through the processes of compression 26 and distanciation 27 , American Muslims learn the rules of the ‘game’ and therefore approach their faith and its place in American society using partly rational and partly intuitive cognition mechanisms. Dispositions that constitute the habitus for these diasporic individuals are deeply conditioned responses manifested spontaneously in their daily lives. Faced with discrimination and racism because of their faith, Muslim Americans confront the power structures of the established habitus by challenging the prejudicial legitimization of the social forms of domination that are commonplace in the U.S. By starting the NYU Islamic center, Moghul aims to redefine the “habitus” from its predefined and biased socially ingrained perceptions and dispositions towards Muslims and amongst Muslims from different Islamic denominations. As Moghul states: “Outside Muhammad’s massive ummah the Prophet is often mocked, rarely acknowledged, and above all ignored. In the West we say ‘Judeo-Christian,’ excising Islam from the tradition of which it is undeniably a part” (HTBAM 66). The religious foundation of the U.S. is predominantly based on the Judeo-Christian tradition, so by placing Islam within this historical reality, Moghul attempts to highlight the universality of Islam. 28 He also aims to show the similarities between these three faiths that influence the behaviors and beliefs of Americans, similarities that have become an integral part of the U.S. habitus and deeply ingrained in the actions of its European settlers. 26 The concept of ‘time-space compression’ was introduced by sociologist David Harvey in 1990. Primarily aimed at analyzing the impact of communication technologies and transportation advancements in reducing temporal and spatial barriers for economic globalization, time-space compression can also be applied to diasporic identity. The last few decades have seen the migration of highly skilled labor from South Asia into the U.S. and these migrants have been able to stay in touch with their ancestral homeland both virtually and physically with relatively fewer hardships when compared to the migrants in the first half of the twentieth century and earlier. Their access to knowledge is instantaneous and their ability to straddle across multiple homelands is facilitated through social time-space compression. 27 The term time-space distanciation was proposed by sociologist Anthony Giddens (1979, 1984) to describe the stretching of social systems across space and time. Giddens used this concept in the context of structuration theory to reject the conventional belief in social theory that considers societies and cultures as coherent and bounded. When applied to diasporic identity, it helps us understand the dynamic nature of cultural systems and dislocate culture from local space and time by abstracting it into the economic, political, and social aspects of life in late modernity. Diasporic identity has progressed from an identity rooted in strictly a monolithic ancestral culture characterized by low levels of time-space distanciation to a form of identity guided by both old and new cultural systems, enabling them to create a new hybrid identity. Furthermore, considering Giddens’ (1984) view of the structuration theory, higher levels of timespace distanciation allow for the interpretation of rules and mores in a non-deterministic way since they are applied reflexively and, if needed, can be adapted, replaced, or reproduced differently to serve the needs of society. 28 Islam sees prior prophets and their followers as Muslims, believers in an earlier iteration of the same faith Muhammad was sent to renew and revitalize. Rather than see Islam as a descendant of Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity, Muslims see Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity as offshoots of a primal Islam. Since Muslims believe prophets were sent to all nations, some have made the case that Hinduism, Buddhism, and many other preMuhammadan religions may also be branches of the same primordial faith, which God first vouchsafed to Adam (HTBAM 70). 67 Continuing this line of inquiry, Bhaskar (1979) argues that if human agency is dependent on social structures, these structures themselves also require the proliferation of some actions and pre-conditions. Furthermore, the people living in these social structures possess the ability to reflect and take actions necessary to change these structures. For social transformation to occur, Bhaskar (1979) contends that events occurring in society cannot be purely attributed to people even though these very people and their actions form the social structure. In doing so, Bhaskar (1979) rejects the Durkheimian notion of power exerted by dominant social groups in determining the course of society by excluding the marginalized groups. If society is not solely created by people from scratch because it pre-exists, and if it is dependent on the activity of the people that compose it, then each of them is a necessary condition for the other. For Bhaskar (1979), both are required to transform social activity. Moghul presents the argument by the Pakistani poet Iqbal (a scholar educated in Western philosophy in Germany and England), who rejects the notion of collectivism in existential development. Iqbal instead argues that if Muslims believed that the physical world was merely a manifestation of God and that everyone was the same, instead of regarding the world as a transitory space for moving to the next dimension, then no action would be possible. At the individual level, interpreting Iqbal’s philosophy, Moghul argues that the self’s purpose in life is “to become full of our selves, more completely and courageously individuated” (HTBAM 93). As Moghul explains, the reason for this individuation is that “Iqbal refused to accept the world as it was. He demanded that Muslims rise again. He refused to accept that Islam was a spent force” (HTBAM 93). Therefore, at the structural level, Moghul reasons that Islam is “not the automation of Homo sapiens by ritual indoctrination” (HTBAM 93); rather it is a “technology of the self that produced persons who were not controlled by the world, but bended the world to their will” (HTBAM 93). Both Iqbal and Moghul believe that historically Islam has always adapted well to reason and critique and adapted to the prevailing world order. Therefore, rather than accepting the established cliché that Islam needs a reformation in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to consider Islam as an ongoing reformation. Moghul further argues that just as Iqbal was not blindly mining ideas from Western thinkers, we need to look at non-Arabian interpretative traditions beyond the Quran by adopting thoughts from other philosophers like Ghazali and poets like Rumi and Iqbal. It is not possible to equate the interpretation of the sources with the sources themselves. Moghul elucidates one such possibility for rational thinking in the example of the Indo-Pakistani poet and philosopher Iqbal – Islam, Iqbal argued, was genetically dynamic: it was meant to be purposeful movement in a world fated to change. Iqbal not only went back to Islam’s sources but also demanded every generation of Muslims separately and together do the same. Iqbal took Muslim societies, ideas, and practices, and compared and contrasted these with Islam’s sources, which Sunni Muslims would contend are primarily the Qur’an and the life of the Prophet. Then Iqbal urged us to reflect honestly on the results of such comparison and contrast. (HTBAM 95) Moreover, Bhaskar (1979) posits that social structures have emergent properties and are comparable to objects in the physical world, albeit with three key differences. Firstly they “do not exist independently of the activities they govern” (38), which means that they are interdependent. Secondly, social structures can be considered from a constructionist perspective because they are influenced by the “agents’ conceptions of what they are doing” (38). The transformative power can be harnessed by influencing people’s beliefs to ultimately change the discursive reality. Thirdly, unlike physical objects, human belief can change in a relatively more straightforward manner and does not require an elaborate process of evolution. Although this human agency is exerted by material beings, Bhaskar (1979) explains that because of the emergent consequences of 68 neurophysiological complexity in human beings, they can act intentionally and produce change. Through the “synchronic emergent powers of materialism” (97), he proposes that “the powers associated with the mind are both real, that is, causally efficacious… and irreducible, that is, emergent from matter” (107), rejecting the reductionist perspectives that propound that the action of individuals is determined only from a physiological perspective. As a result, the intentionality of human action is partly also based on reason which is an example of our emergent thought process. In tracing the history of political and social changes brought about by Prophet Muhammad in the Arabian Peninsula at the advent of Islam, Moghul demonstrates how the prophet’s personal actions were in direct conflict with the majority in Mecca. Muhammad’s religion had long challenged aristocratic Mecca’s glass and ordinary ceilings, but it had now become a threat to their way of life: the Prophet had gone from the persecuted leader of an unimpressive collection of marginalized converts to the governor of a city-state that lay astride Mecca’s lifelines, the trade routes to Persia and Byzantium. (HTBAM 75) Yet, as Islam spread outside the Arabian Peninsula, it dramatically transformed society and people by focusing on their good qualities and appealing to their intellect and reason. Moghul attempts to separate the revelation aspect of Islam from its civilizational part to remind us of the similar circumstances presented to Muslim Americans and look for precedence in the Prophet’s life. Additionally, by combining ontological realism with epistemological relativism, Bhaskar (1978) maintains that reality has depth, but knowledge cannot fully penetrate to the bottom of that depth. In the case of diasporic individuals, Bhaskar’s argument for an ontology of stratified emergence and differentiated structures can be used to challenge the epistemic fallacy, which “consists in the view that statements about being can be reduced to or analyzed in terms of statements about knowledge” (36). When starting the Islamic Center at NYU, Moghul contends that he began approaching religion based on constructing an external worldview that reflected his internal beliefs. By challenging the conventional radical interpretations of Islam, he focused on the universality of its message by localizing its practice even in a geography that is essentially incompatible with this diasporic faith. When the first generation has barely come to terms with their own identity in a foreign land, it becomes even more difficult for the second generation to make sense of their “being” and “becoming.” The parents rely on their familiar networks of a culture shared by their former homeland, but their homeland bears no resemblance to their existential reality for the children. Reinterpreting al-Ghazali, Moghul believes that for South Asian Muslim Americans, in the absence of understanding Arabic, among other things, religious knowledge is acquired through intuitive, experiential, and empirical means, which he equates to “becoming.” But he disputes that “knowing” something does not necessarily mean “becoming” something and definitely not “being” that thing. People can master religion but not be religious at all. Moghul then emphasizes that Islam requires self-transformation, which can only occur through the Foucauldian concept of “technology of the self,” where we constantly improve the “self” even as we continuously measure the “self.” Therefore, “knowing,” “being,” and “becoming” are inseparable in the co-creation of identity among diasporic individuals for them to make sense of the world. In summarizing Iqbal’s philosophy of the reformation of Islam and the Muslim “self,” Moghul proposes that: 69 The Qur’an not only could be applied to the world even as it provided me serenity and purpose but it should. Would have to. Just as Islam is regularly judged by secular epistemologies, I wondered if, say, Rumi’s ontology could become the foundation for an alternative means of knowing—and doing—and critiquing. If Iqbal’s vision of khudi 29 could be used as a mechanism for understanding life, even or especially my own life. If we could draw nourishment from other embodiments of faith and belief. (HTBAM 96) Likewise, in the age of rampant misinformation about Islam and Muslims in the American media, Moghul questions how non-Muslim Americans can understand a culture about which they do not have any direct experience. This points to the infallibility of knowledge perpetrated on social media platforms; but this transitive domain of knowledge can change over time with the right conversations. As for the intransitive objects of knowledge, Moghul offers a historical perspective of Islam across the world and its certain core aspects that remain the same despite the diversity of religious beliefs in Islamic communities in the U.S. At the end of the historical trajectory, which concludes with his family’s emigration to the U.S., he takes it upon himself “to carry this legacy, this unbroken fourteen-hundred-year-old chain, to the New World, migrating as our predecessors did, loyal to God, yes, but also to the ummah, the worldwide community of Muslims” (HTBAM 16). Moghul also evokes intergenerational differences in building institutions. He states that first-generation immigrants were born into Islam which they carried with them to the U.S. and most often reproduced without much thought. Whereas the second generation struggled in determining which parts of their faith they could keep and which parts they could let go. In this regard, Giddens (1979) observes that systemic knowledge is transformed into actions through embedded memory, also called “memory traces.” Besides, “[s]tructures exist both internally within agents as memory traces that are the product of phenomenological and hermeneutic inheritance” (Stones 2005:27). In addition to emphasizing the duality of structure, Giddens also refers to the concept of recursiveness by suggesting that “the essential recursiveness of social life, as constituted in social practices: structure is both medium and outcome of reproduction of practices. Structure enters simultaneously into the constitution of the agent and social practices, and ‘exists’ in the generating moments of this constitution” (1979:5). Moghul optimistically narrates the changing face of Islamic institutions in the U.S. led by young Americans with equal gender representations. He states that, “[c]haplains are a great development in American Islam, freeing students to focus on academics, student life, and new opportunities for personal and social growth” (HTBAM 86). Some scholars argue that relations shaped in a specific structure are independent of the context in which they have been created and, therefore can even exist out of time and place (Bryant and Jary 2003). When confronted by the differences in his Turkish wife’s (Hafsa) Islamic culture, Moghul draws the distinction between religion and culture for Muslims today and argues that Muslimness does not necessarily imply sameness. 29 At the center of Iqbal’s philosophy is khudi, a term that originally meant selfishness. (The root, “khv,” is present in the Persian word for God, Khuda, and in English as “sui”-cide.) Iqbal asked Muslims to revisit the definition of “khudi,” or rather, by force of personality and argument, he forevermore forced them to. Through him, “khudi” began to mean self-fullness, a robust and vigorous individuality, the original and necessary form of which existed as the Divine “I”—Khuda—and the contingent form in “us.” Rather, actually, as us. Iqbal believed we are selves, though more potentially than actually (HTBAM 93). 70 Like many modern Muslims, steeped in some kind of neo-Islamist miasma, I was taught that religion and culture were two different and exclusive things, and that the more of one you had, the less of the other. This is not only very stupid, but explains why so much of religious Muslim life is so godawful boring, and so much of our contemporary literature is literally childish: we are afraid to think complicated thoughts, for fear that any kind of nuance is only a gateway drug to heretical atheism. (HTBAM 136) Giddens (1979) posits that structuration follows a cycle of give-and-take between agents and structures, resulting in the combined actions becoming a part of the duality of structure. Furthermore, social change occurs from a confluence of microand macro-level forces. Social practices and attitudes are generally affected by large-scale social movements occurring at the macro-level, which are in the first place caused by people’s discontentment with smaller microlevel issues in their daily lives. Institutionalized action and routinization are fundamental to creating social order and the reproduction of social systems, but routinized social practices are not a result of merely simple coincidence; rather they are accomplished by skilled and knowledgeable agents. Giddens (1979) elaborates that: […] trust and tact, as basic properties which participants bring to encounters, can be interpreted in terms of the relation between a basic security system, the sustaining (in praxis) of a sense of ontological security, and the routine nature of social reproduction which agents skillfully organize. The monitoring of the body, the control and use of face in ‘face work’ – these are fundamental to social integration in time and space. (86) Moghul has learned to go beyond the fetishized rituals of religion and disdains “superstitious and incantatory mysticism,” which he thinks is reserved “for people who did not want to fight, to argue, to build, to succeed, to struggle” (HTBAM 187). Through his systematic acquisition of knowledge, his “predilection for action and construction, a new world would be born, history rerouted” (HTBAM 187). The last part of the structuration cycle provides an explanation that involves “a dialectic of presence and absence which ties the most minor or trivial forms of social action to structural properties of the overall society, and to the coalescence of institutions over long stretches of historical time” (Giddens 1979:24). It can be derived that even small social actions are responsible for changing or perpetuating social systems and that agents always possess dialectical control, which can bring about social change. In this regard, media plays a large part in reflecting and shaping people’s worldviews, both positively and negatively (Gauntlett 2008). Moghul regrets that the so-called “experts” on the Middle East in the American media know nothing about Islam. Yet, they are allowed to interpret the socio-political-cultural events in Islamic countries “because they’re (usually) white males. What I mean to say is, certain people are assumed capable of rising above not just their own but all particularities, for they presumedly possess none. Everything about them is universal” (HTBAM 87-88). Throughout the memoir, Moghul presents other examples of bigotry and discrimination from Eurocentric cultures urging us to reevaluate the structural inequalities. To conclude, we must consider that in culturally complex countries like the U.S., faced with hybrid identities among diasporic individuals, there is a need to acknowledge the emergent properties of the collective (Durkheim 1960) and its impact on both the diaspora as well as the native populations. For South Asian Muslim Americans, social structure cannot be considered an epiphenomenon, since we have yet to see the impact of their actions and activities in achieving a radical mindset shift in the U.S. At the heart of the conflict is the adherence to Islam by diasporic individuals and the image of Islam prevalent in the U.S. and perpetrated by the media. Like all second-generation diasporic individuals, Moghul struggles with his American identity and 71 wonders if he could really become a part of white America and then, can his faith find a place in the U.S. “But fleeing into whiteness would be abandoning who I was, and I don’t just mean this religiously, because Islam is a religion, yes, but Islam is also a cultural identity, a heritage, an ethnic marker, a civilization, and sometimes more these things than faith” (HTBAM 30). In the aftermath of 9/11, several studies 30 have been conducted to situate the Islamic faith and its customs in America, both for Muslims and non-Muslims (A. Ahmed 2007, 2010, 2018), to promote interfaith dialog. These glocal conflicts and the attempts to resolve them rightly emphasize that any debate about the duality of structure and agency should acknowledge the centrality of faith when analyzing primarily Islamic societies or when discussing identity in the Muslim diaspora. While we see that the concepts of structuration have been extended from the field of social sciences (Bourdieu 1977, Giddens 1984, Bhaskar 1979) to other fields such as economics (Lawson 2015), critical psychology (Dreier 2008), information systems (Mutch 2010), education policy (Archer 2003), and in entrepreneurship (Mole and Mole 2010), there is still some work that needs to be done in accounting for the importance and resurgence of religion within late modernity. Borrowing from intercultural communication studies, one possibility of achieving structural and social changes and therefore creating a more wholesome American identity for diasporic individuals is to move away from ethnocentric approaches to cultural differences. At the other end of the spectrum is the phenomenon of ethnoconvergence, that can be used to describe the relative convergence of multiple cultural identities in diasporic individuals. As societies and individuals move from behaviors and practices that favor ethnocentrism to those that favor ethnorelativism, the resultant transition can be characterized as ethnoconvergence. This term can be used to describe cultural convergence at ethnic and religious levels for the South Asian Muslim American diaspora and their subsequent generations. Although this term is relatively new and not used for this specific purpose, it has been used in similar contexts to describe the two-way interaction between globalization and local cultures leading to ethnoconvergence of cultures (Nayak 2011). It has also been used to interpret the perspectives of Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes on the genesis of Hispanic cultures in Latin America. …ethnoconvergence seem to be a reaction to the late-twentieth-century tension between the promises of global cosmopolitanism and the dilution of national projects in Latin America (…), clouded by the fear of a cultural globalization guided by American cultural imperatives. Fuentes responds with a reaffirmation of a new type of transnational identity, which we could call “Transhispanic,” that is based on concepts that echo the contemporary late-twentieth-century anxiety before an “Americanization of culture”. (Ribas 2011:169) Furthermore, to describe both conformity and resistance as being part of the cultural process in our highly globalized world such that “a dose of conformity accompanying a tendency toward resistance can synthetically help keep broad cultural processes on an even keel, balancing mind and body, conflicting theories and methods and modes of living, and styles of reason and unreason in equilibrium” (Merrell 2011:77). In diasporic individuals, we see a degree of conformance to the mainstream culture to function optimally in the foreign land as well as a resistance towards the center by retaining aspects of their own culture to be true to their original “self,” resulting in a confluence and convergence of different cultures. 30 For detailed findings based on six years of research and 50,000 plus interviews representing Muslims in more than 35 Muslim countries, which represents the largest and most comprehensive study of Muslim opinion about the West and particularly about the U.S., see Esposito and Mogahed’s Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims really think. 72 Drawing from Giddens’ Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy (1998), I end with three examples from Moghul’s memoir on how convergence, and by extension ethnoconvergence, as a social movement can ultimately lead to social change via the “democratization of democracy” resulting in a “dialogic democracy.” Firstly, from a material viewpoint, convergence is “the tendency of unrelated animals and plants to evolve superficially similar characteristics under similar environmental conditions” (Lexico “Convergence”). Moghul shows us that the diasporic individuals learn and adapt to some of the cultural norms and values at a superficial level and develop certain similarities with the mainstream society, not just to conform to the center but to coexist meaningfully in the foreign land so that there is a sense of shared social coherence and congruence. Secondly, from a spatial viewpoint, convergence is “a location where airflows or ocean currents meet, characteristically marked by upwelling (of air) or downwelling (of water)” (Lexico “Convergence”). Through his own work as a Fellow in Jewish-Muslim Relations at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and his memoir, Moghul outlines the urgent need for a two-way relationship between the center and the margin to maintain cultural harmony. In coming together, there is some level of conformity which, although unbalanced in the contemporary U.S. is slowly being challenged through cultural resistance and a desire to maintain and advance one’s heritage culture. Thirdly, from a logical viewpoint, convergence can be defined as a “property (exhibited by certain infinite series and functions) of approaching a limit more and more closely as an argument (variable) of the function increases or decreases or as the number of terms of the series increases” (Encyclopedia Britannica “Divergence”). From a South Asian perspective, religion appears to be more important than ethnicity, as seen by the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 based on religion rather than ethnicity or linguistic similarities. “Islam is not just what you believe; for most Muslims, who aren’t recent converts, Islam is part of where they come from and who they come from” (HTBAM 30). Therefore, religion needs to be included in any discussion of ethnicity in the case of the South Asian American Muslim diaspora because Islam heavily influences all cultural norms, values, traditions, and practices. To move toward a state of ethnoconvergence, especially in the post 9/11 U.S., Moghul shows us that some Muslim Americans tend to balance the overt manifestation of religion in specific contexts. Some are observed to increase it in social situations where appropriate to feel at ease and be true to their original “self” or decrease it in situations that demand shared spaces of coexistence. One way to achieve a balance is through dialog and transcultural communication between different groups so that the diasporic “self” can navigate identarian challenges in the age of reflexive modernity. For Moghul, it was representing the Islamic Center at NYU, as he perceived his place in the Islamic community and the crisis unfolding in the U.S. He attributes his successes to his reading of Islamic history as well as his hybrid religious humanist upbringing. “I helped build a growing community, defended it at its most vulnerable—when our city, our country, our sense of ourselves, and even my religion were attacked—and kept on, establishing a fixture on Gotham’s religious landscape (HTBAM 125). He is no longer caught between Muslimness and Westernness, Americanness and Pakistaniness, for he can embrace all these identities as complimentary without reducing his core “self” to any one result, label, or type. 73 1.5 Integration of South Asian Muslim Americans across temporal and spatial boundaries in Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place for Us I will wait by the gate until I see your face. I have waited a decade, haven’t I, in this limited life? Waiting in the endless one would be no sacrifice. And Inshallah one day, I know I will see you approaching. You will look just as you did at twenty, that year you first left us, and I will also be as I was in my youth. We will look like brothers on that day. We will walk together, as equals. Fatima Farheen Mirza, A Place for Us Fatima Farheen Mirza’s debut novel, A Place for Us (APFU), published in 2018, is a New York Times bestseller that depicts the American immigrant experience from the perspective of a family drawing their heritage culture from India. More than the longing for the native homeland, Mirza focuses on narrating the story from an American perspective and their lived reality in the twenty-first century. Mirza traces the struggles of firstand second-generation characters in finding their place in the U.S., both within the local Muslim community and within the larger American society. Born and raised in California, Mirza is a second-generation Indian American writer constantly negotiating the physical and cultural spaces of her father’s homeland in India, her mother’s family in the U.K., and her own existence in the U.S. She has stated in several interviews (2018, 2019) that the novel is not autobiographical. Although it is about a devout Muslim American family, it is not meant to be seen in terms of the religion that separates the characters from their cultural milieu in the U.S. Rather it provides a narrative that others from her own generation and ethnic background can relate to. Growing up, Mirza wanted to become a writer. Still, there were no contemporary South Asian role models that she could identify with in literature, so this novel is a decade-long attempt to create a space for showing the universal experience of an American Muslim family and love from varied perspectives. The story merges cultures and communities, tracing multiple transformative layers of space-time that make us question our traditional notion of the identity of a place. However, it is impossible to write a novel with Muslim characters and not evoke the themes of belonging, identity, and faith for diasporic individuals today. In a post 9/11 America, Mirza draws us into the rapidly escalating religious tensions and the different characters’ relationship with Islam by highlighting the effects of the multidimensional nature of space-time on those inheriting complex cultural identities. The proponents of assimilation (Park 1924, Park 1950, Gordon 1968) argue that successive generations of immigrants in the U.S. will blend in to form a singular American culture practiced by the mainstream, implying that all other forms of cultural expressions are non-American. However, as discussed before, today’s demographic make-up of the U.S. has forced scholars to rethink the concept of assimilation for new waves of immigrants and their successive generations (Alba and Nee 2005). As the post-1965 wave of immigrants gains momentum in size and voice, the conceptualization of American identity needs to be reconfigured to suit the needs of a transcultural society with pluralistic cultural norms, values, and traditions. Furthermore, in today’s digital transformation era, the Internet and new media platforms are shrinking the world like never before, and total cultural assimilation is unrealistic and impossible to achieve and expect. Secondgeneration individuals from the Muslim American diaspora have more ways to remain in touch with their parents’ homeland and, in the process to assert their Islamic religious and cultural 80 […] no, my father points out the stars in the sky to us if we haven’t looked up in a while, he teaches us how to look for the new moon to mark the month, he reads books he underlines with a faint gray pencil. My father always says excuse me if he passes someone too close in the street. My father has never lost his temper at a stranger. (APFU 378) The horror and marginalization caused for Muslim Americans because of 9/11 can be equated to abjection (Kristeva 1982) for Rafiq. Despite his strong religious beliefs, he asks his daughters not to wear their hijabs. “We don’t know how people will react,” he said. “We don’t know where they will direct their anger if they are afraid” (APFU 117). But for the daughters, the hijab has become a part of their identity, and the son feels hatred towards the members of the Islamic community, the very people he was taught to have a shared sense of identity. “I refuse”, Hadia said. “What have we done?” “Please”, Baba asked her. “Please. Listen to me.” He had never said please before. His voice, the expression on his face–he was unrecognizable. None of them spoke. Hadia and Huda went into a bedroom, closed the door. I hate them, Amar thought, picturing the terrorists they have showed on TV, I hate them more than I’ve ever hated anyone. (APFU 117) In conclusion, APFU sketches a trajectory of an immigrant family and their search for a home in the literal and figurative sense possible through the process of integration by careful navigation of the relative advantages and disadvantages of time-space compression and distanciation. As seen through the developmental trajectories of the Hadia, Huda, and Amar in embracing Islam in America and the relative change in Rafiq and Lyla’s attitudes towards the distanciation in spatial and temporal terms from their heritage culture, APFU highlights the increasing structural deficiencies in each generation’s struggle to forge their hybrid identity in a neoliberal society. The U.S. continues to receive waves of immigrants from non-European and non-Anglo-Saxon countries. The second generation of the post-1965 immigrants have also reached a critical mass and are no longer regarded as immigrants but naturalized American citizens with access to the same fundamental American resources as their non-Muslim compatriots. The development of identity among these diasporic individuals in the U.S. has to integrate the needs of its diverse population, who don’t necessarily subscribe solely to the material aspects of American culture but are also striving to practice a faith that currently does not have a respectable place in the U.S. Any integral concept of ‘development’ has to be fundamentally concerned with the existential issues that form the basis of human life on this planet. These include embeddedness in culture, including its artistic dimensions, the religious dimension of human life, and, inevitably, suffering. Any concept of development concerned only with the external aspects of life – growth, accumulation, consumption, material resources and even politics narrowly defined – is profoundly impoverished. (Clammer 2012:242) Belonging, identity, faith, and self-acceptance come to the forefront in the twenty-first century for any attempt at creating space for diversity in a world where people are judged based on appearance, religious affiliation, and personal choices that do not conform to the mainstream’s idea of American identity. APFU successfully debunks the myth and stigma surrounding Islam for nonMuslims. For Muslims, the novel demonstrates the possibility of practicing faith in the U.S. and the option of creating a transcultural American identity. The last part of the novel is a deconstruction of the process of creating this transcultural identity. If Rafiq is seen as a strict father throughout the narrative, then in the final part, Rafiq reflexively explains the intention behind his every action. He confesses that: 81 Of all my mistakes the greatest, the most dangerous, was not emphasizing the mercy of God. Every verse of the Quran begins by reminding us of God’s mercy, I tried to tell you that, and you nodded, but how can I know what you heard or what you would remember. (APFU 381) Rafiq is aware of the importance of forgiveness, but he cannot convert it into action. His son Amar, seen from an orthodox religious perspective, is a very bad Muslim, someone who drinks and doesn’t care about the community. However, Amar is always shown to be kind and considerate to everyone he meets in life. Mirza deliberately uses this intergenerational juxtaposition to represent the changing nature of faith and belonging in the U.S. for South Asian Muslim Americans. At the same time, APFU is an American novel with predominantly Muslim American characters. It represents the daily lives and struggles of the older and younger generations to create spatiotemporal transcultural identities in the U.S., first as human beings, then as Muslims, and finally as Americans. In Part One, the spatiality and temporality of the South Asian Muslim American universe have been located. In the backdrop of globalization, the nature of immigration is different from the migration of indentured labor during the colonial era. The meaning of belonging is being redefined by second-generation writers such as Ayad Akhtar, Haroon Moghul, and Fatima Farheen Mirza. The politics of representation and identity for Muslim Americans is more important than before, and there is a need to destigmatize the tribal nature ascribed to Middle Eastern Islam. In Part Two, we will shift the focus from an identity rooted in space to an identity rooted in culture. Like other diaspora fiction in contemporary literature, a distinct feature of South Asian American fiction is the shift from multiand inter-culturality to trans-culturality. The literary works discussed in Part Two will explore various aspects of transculture, transculturation, and transculturality. It will situate religion as a critical aspect of identity (re)formation in South Asian Muslim Americans. 82 Part Two– Shifting Perspectives: From Multicultural Identity to Transcultural Personhood in South Asian Muslim American Literature 83 2.1 Theorizing Identity in South Asian Muslim American Diaspora from an Intercultural Perspective My dad is from that generation where he feels like if you come to this country, you pay the American dream tax. You endure racism, and if it doesn’t cost you your life, pay it. There you go, Uncle Sam. But for me, I was born here. So, I actually have the audacity of equality. I’m like, “I’m in Honors Gov, I have it right here. Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. All men created equal.” It says it right here, I’m equal. I’m equal. I don’t deserve this. Hasan Minhaj, Homecoming King Culture plays a vital role in defining a person’s identity, especially in a foreign land. Questions of identity come to the surface, particularly when one is away from the native homeland trying to make sense of one’s new environment and find one’s bearings as they gradually progress in their physical and psychological journey. In our hyperconnected world today, diasporic individuals constantly negotiate multiple identities and struggle every day to balance these identities. There may be some apprehension that these multiple identities cannot coexist and are not alterable. In our discussion on identity in South Asian Muslim American literature, it is important to establish key constructs such as culture and cultural identity and their impact on identity construction among diasporic individuals in the contemporary era. One of the salient definitions relevant to the twenty-first century and frequently used in intercultural communication is that culture is “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another” (Hofstede 1991:19). Furthermore, culture is a complex social phenomenon that comprises behavior, norms, and customs of individuals and groups living in a society passed on from one generation to another. From an anthropological perspective, culture can be viewed as a society’s memory, or in other words, it denotes the collective knowledge of a group (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1963). There are various aspects of this knowledge system: culture is shared by groups belonging to different races, ethnicities, or nationalities; it is manifested through beliefs, arts, customs, policies, and habits; it acts as a medium for communication and provides a common language to its members; it is transmitted across generations or acquired by outsiders who want to become a part of that group; and finally it is in a constant state of change and remains fluid by adapting to the needs of the new members, be it from within the group or from outside (Hong and Khei 2014). By considering culture as knowledge, it is implied that it can be learned or acquired systematically. The value systems, customs, traditions, and social behaviors make the fundamental building blocks of culture. If self-identity is a clustering of beliefs, values, physical and psychological traits of a person, then cultural identity is a collection of processes comprising all the distinguishing characteristics common to and shared by individuals belonging to a group or a culture (Hong 2009). These processes can be conceptualized as the operation of a group’s shared knowledge where individuals form a mental image of this common knowledge. However, because of the unique self-identity of everyone within the group, this shared knowledge is not manifested uniformly by the members of that group (Hong and Khei 2014). Culture can also be considered as consisting of frameworks of maps of meaning which allow us to unravel the ambiguity that exists in the world. A society shares these maps of meaning and these shared meanings will enable us to make sense of the world around us (E.T. Hall 1976). All these definitions of culture from 84 psychology, sociology, anthropology and communication studies are fundamental to our understanding of culture. However, we need to critically examine and evaluate the themes and conceptualizations that lie deep beneath the surface of the cultural iceberg to comprehend the complexity of cultural identity in the diaspora. One of the critical questions to evaluate is the applicability of the theories and approaches developed in the second half of the twentieth century to South Asian American immigrants and their successive generations in the twenty-first century. If our world has changed drastically from events of the postcolonial era in the fifties and sixties to the events that forced the cultural turn in the eighties, then the transformation that has occurred between the eighties and the end of the twentieth century is unmatched to that of the past fifty years. The pace, rhythm, and rate at which the world has metamorphosed into its current state in merely two decades of this new millennium are unprecedented. Based on what we have seen so far, the transmogrification of our physical, virtual, and psychological spaces is bound to continue at galactic speeds. Therefore, we need appropriate tools, processes, and constructs to define who we are, who we are “becoming,” and from a spiritual, humanistic point of view, who we want to “become” and how we want to shape our “being” and “becoming.” Continuing our discussion about the definition of culture, let us consider an explanation that helps us move easily between the various deeply interconnected aspects of cultural studies. A conceptualization that combines textual analysis by drawing on the legacy of cultural studies’ foundations in anthropology and structural linguistics, combined with governmentality, civics, and policy debates, to engage more pertinently with realities in late modernism is more representative of the literature produced by contemporary South Asian American writers. Battling Islamophobia in print and digital media and creating new forms of making meaning of overcoming the problems of “manufacturing consent” (Herman and Chomsky 1988) in American media, these Muslim American authors are redefining the sense of cultural belonging. Cultural Studies scholar Jeff Lewis (2002) advocates that: Culture is an assemblage of imaginings and meanings that may be consonant, disjunctive, overlapping, contentious, continuous, or discontinuous. These assemblages may operate through various human social groupings and social practices. In contemporary culture, these imagining and meaning-making experiences are intensified through the proliferation of mass media images and information. (23-24) Culture gives us the ability to communicate with each other and to form communities; just as society comprises people, culture includes the imaginings and meanings we attribute to known and unknown phenomena. These meanings are represented using textual analysis tools, always remaining fluid with the ability to be transformed by space, time, and human action. Lewis (2002) argues that “[i]maginings and meanings operate to form one another, but they can never be relied on as stable and sustaining formations. Meaning and imagining can at any time confirm or destabilize one another” (23). Furthermore, the very nature of culture is characterized by transience, transformation, boundlessness, and instability. Unlike the sociologically accepted concept of fixity and orderliness in languages, cultures are open to an infinite number of interpretations, sometimes overpowered by the dominant meaning, but always consisting of “competing interests and many different individuals and groups” (Lewis 2002:23). Moreover, culture includes multiple layers of human personality and interaction like family and relationships, nationality, ethnicity, globality, professional sphere, religion, education, technology affinity, sports, gender, sexuality, and so on. Some of these layers may be subject to formally or informally defined institutionality, subject to its own peculiar rules, regulations, and ideology. These, in turn require conformance from individuals while at the same time not restricting the number of cultures 85 that the individual may practice or the number of institutions that the individual may belong to. It is perfectly acceptable to experience “severe dissonance” (Lewis 2002:23) because of these multiple layers of culture. Finally, thanks to new media and technology, there is a significant increase in the origin and propagation of cultural discourses forming new trends in the twenty-first century. Lewis (2002) contends that “[t]he particular characteristics of electronic communication have rendered the problem of cultural dispute, dissonance, instability, and transition more acute; it has also vastly extended the available resources for imagining and meaning-making” (23). Therefore, Lewis’ (2002) definition of culture liberates it from the fixity related to the implicit dependency on language, ethnicity, race, and discourse. It acknowledges the dissonant coexistence of multiple layers of culture within an individual and, by extension, the existence of such individuals in contemporary society. Furthermore, it decenters the interpretative and ideological dominance of the mainstream culture by allowing any individual, anywhere in the world, at any given time, to imagine their reality and create meaning thanks to the pervasiveness and availability of information in almost real-time to the individuals with access to the right technology. By accepting the dissonance in such a definition of culture, we can acknowledge the presence of norms, values, beliefs, rituals, and ideologies practiced by the mainstream or the socalled dominant groups. No matter what we do, it is not possible to not have some sort of a center that attempts to draw the boundaries closer to itself. Dissonance does not necessarily mean that everything is acceptable; it merely indicates the ability to balance one’s priorities and selfexpression in a given space and time by respecting the sanctity of the shared and communal nature of such a spatio-temporal imagination. As a final remark on Lewis’ (2002) definition of culture, it is impossible to envision a perfect world free from inequality, injustice, and bias. Thus, any individual, including the diasporic individual inhabiting the globalized world in the twenty-first century, needs to be comfortable with their multitudes. They should be able to manifest multiple self-expressions equipped with competencies and strategies to minimize and manage dissonance for peaceful coexistence with other communities. There are several factors and unique challenges to consider when discussing identity development in diasporic individuals of South Asian origin. They include but are not limited to the trauma of geographical dislocation, key life aspects such as employment, marriage and sexuality, friendship and socialization, religion and politics, old age and mourning for the death of loved ones, and preparing for one’s death, and the constant pull and push between multiple cultures for the new generation (S. Akhtar 2014). These are cyclical phenomena and require more sophisticated approaches to analyze the formation and maintenance of identity among diasporic individuals. Globalization has changed the dynamics of geography and space in the twentieth century and beyond. With easy access to transportation, almost real-time connectivity through digital communication technologies, and constant access to social media, the economic codependencies between the U.S. and other countries in terms of manufacturing and knowledge needs as well as the availability of ethnic goods and commodities at the click of a button, the physical borders for the affluent diasporic individuals are becoming less significant than before. In this new era, when societies and states are inhabited by people who can easily coexist in multiple homelands compared to their predecessors, a paradigm shift is needed for the social and political inclusion of the already multicultural and diverse population of South Asia. As Leonard (1997) argues, “South Asians are settling into the United States in ways unanticipated only a decade or two ago. Not only are the young people moving into the American mainstream, but elderly parents are also following their adult children in the United States” (169). While many of these from the older generations are confined to suburban homes, acting as caretakers and proponents of the home 86 culture to their grandchildren, “some of them contribute to changes in American life, helping to make South Asian culture more available” (Leonard 1997:169). For this new wave of South Asian American immigrants to feel comfortable with multiple socio-cultural norms, let us consider two theoretical approaches used in intercultural communication and literary analysis to analyze identity among diasporic individuals. The first approach is multiculturalism, which is one of the most widely accepted and used theories of identity construction in Western nation-states like Australia (Theophanous 1995), Canada (Wayland 1997), the U.K. (Ashcroft and Bevir 2020), and the U.S. (Buenker and Ratner 2005, Orosco 2016). Multicultural identity involves the study of individuals implicated with multiple cultures and the effects of multiculturalism on members of the majority and minority groups. Globalization, along with postcolonialism, has ushered a new era of multiculturalism around the world and has redefined the purpose and meaning of immigration. In a sense, multiculturalism transcends the restrictions posed by nationalism and aims at promoting a more globalized community. Technological advancements and the movement of skilled labor across world markets have only strengthened the need for global citizens. The construct of “multicultural” resulted from mass social and political movements in many western countries such as the U.K., Australia, and Canada in the second half of the twentieth century. This was also a time when the civil rights movement was at its peak in the U.S. Multiculturalism essentially refers to the existence of racially and ethnically diverse populations within a society or a state (Byrd 2015). However, in multicultural societies, individuals and groups live alongside one another, but they do not necessarily engage meaningfully with each other. This is the classic racial and ethnic segregation case commonly found in the U.S. and U.K. In the latter part of the twentieth century, although these minority groups have been accorded seemingly equal status, the equality is rather superficial. The focus is solely on the politics of representation and the morality of fulfilling diversity quotas. Multiculturalism seems to be a concept constructed in direct response to addressing the problem of forced or voluntary homogeneity in societies and countries where individuals from minority ethnicities and races are required to assimilate and acculturate to the mainstream culture. It then appears to be a question of morality for the liberal Western countries that advocate the idea of multiculturalism to provide a level playing field for the cultural, ethnic, and racial diversities that they are faced with. Further, multiculturalism assumes that culture is static and that the changes in one culture, especially over successive generations, will not impact the other cultures, as each culture seems to operate individually. However, Kukathas (1993) argues: The fundamental point to be made here is that ethnicity and culture are not static but constantly changing in response to economic, social and political conditions. In looking at culturally pluralistic societies – that is to say, most societies – what we find are neither melting pots nor mosaics but ever-shifting kaleidoscopic patterns. In absolute terms, there are few if any stable cultural formations, since nearly all are affected not only by immigration and intermarriage but also by the trade in cultural products and information, and by the expansion of the world’s largest industry: tourism. (24) The idea of pluralism then emerges and seems more plausible to explain the concept of multicultural nation-states or societies. Kukathas (1993) contends that multiculturalism should only be considered as one aspect of pluralism. Furthermore, multiculturalism should not be allowed to dominate the construct of pluralism as culture is only one of several aspects of pluralistic societies. Joppke (2017) argues that multiculturalism is essential for a liberal society to function especially in the context of increasing waves of immigration across the world. For antidiscrimination legislation and public measures to work in a diverse social milieu, Joppke (2017) 87 suggests that anti-discrimination needs to embrace multiculturalism in the sense of accounting for the social multiplicities of the minorities which may be in direct opposition to mainstream conventional practices. He proposes an alternative in the form of ‘multiculturalism of the individual’ that is liberal-individualist instead of being focused on the group as a whole. This allows for the possibility of hybrid and multiple identities because it welcomes differences and even furthers them making such individuals visible to the mainstream society instead of blending them as a part of just another minority cultural group. Phillips (2009) concurs in this regard when culture is prioritized at group-level over individuals to ease the notions of multiculturalism in Western societies. She argues that one of the biggest problems with culture is its “tendency to represent individuals from minority or non-Western groups as driven by their culture and compelled by cultural dictates to behave in particular ways” (8-9). In doing so, she continues to argue that “[c]ulture is now widely employed in a discourse that denies human agency, defining individuals through their culture, and treating culture as the explanation for virtually everything they say or do” (9). When translated to legal and public policy, she contends, “[t]his sometimes features as part of the case of multicultural policies or concessions, but it more commonly appears in punitive policies designed to stamp out what have been deemed inappropriate or unacceptable practices” (9). Therefore, she offers that especially, in the case of religion, particularly Islam in Western societies, “[i]t would be difficult to argue that citizens as individuals do not have the right to follow the prescriptions of their religion, or that religious authorities do not have the right to offer authoritative interpretations of religious law” (171). She is opposed to multicultural policies that give or distribute power to different cultural groups, because “[t]he rights that matter in developing a case of multiculturalism are those of individuals, not groups” (165). Furthermore, she asserts that the rights at the heart of the matter involve personal quotidian aspects such as “the right to choose a marriage partner without interference from the state, to follow the dress code prescribed by one’s religion or culture, or more generally, to live one’s life in accordance with one’s beliefs” (165). Following her comment that none of these rights “should be seen as unconditional for like most rights, they depend on context and may need to be balanced against other rights” (65), it can be concluded that the circumstances of each individual may be different from the priorities set by the group they primarily identify with, and that cultural difference is not the sole identifier in the formation of immigrant, post-immigrant, and diasporic identities. In addition to cultural multiplicity, in the twenty-first century, we also need to consider multiplicities in aspects related to demographics, geographical concentration, economy, social classification, religious institutions, politics, psychological, intellectual, and scientific choices, and even morality which all lead to the idea that societies exhibit pluralism rather than multiculturalism. To summarize, traditionally multicultural identities reflect the most commonly understood meaning of multiculturalism: the peaceful coexistence of multiple diverse cultures within a state. The concept of national identity can easily replace multicultural identity. Old school proponents of multiculturalism argue for creating a shared common culture in the interest of political and social stability. However, such a culture often seems to be equated to national identity or aligns with the values and norms of the mainstream dominant cultural group. For the reasons stated above, pluralistic societies are much more complex to govern, and attempts at assimilation and acculturation have failed for the non-European immigrants in the U.S. Nevertheless, there have been several attempts to theorize the psychological and developmental aspects of multicultural identity, ranging from socio-cognitive elements to integrative and intersectional aspects of intergroup relations (Benet-Martínez and Hong 2014). It should also be noted that multiculturalism has not been devoid of criticism. Many scholars consider it a failed model for dealing with 88 challenges posed by diverse ethnic and religious communities around the world (see Hudson and Réno 2000; Jansen 2013; Nathan 2010; and Werbner and Modood 2015). The second approach is interculturalism, which can be understood as the process of developing significant relationships between multiple ethnic and racial groups. Each is impacted by the other, ultimately leading to a change in the country’s social, moral, political, and economic fabric. There is a notion of mutuality, reciprocity, equality, understanding, and acceptance of all the pluralistic aspects that impact the processes of “being” and “becoming,” including cultural diversity and differences among all individuals, hosts, and diasporic individuals alike. In other words, interculturalism is not a substitute for the national identity attributed to the individuals from the mainstream group. Interculturalism thrives in societies that promote the ideals of ethnorelativism. The Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) by Bennett (1986, 2004, 2013) introduced the idea of interculturalism as a developmental capacity of an individual where they can negotiate the differences between cultures by accepting and accommodating aspects of their own culture and those of the other culture with a sense of progressive ease. Extending this concept to societies, as they move from ethnocentrism to ethnorelativism, there is a shift in collective cognition and behavior of both the dominant and the minority groups. However, Bennett’s model is geared more towards developing the competencies needed to increase intercultural sensitivity and lacks a framework that can help analyze intercultural identity in literary narratives. Building on the concepts of pluralism, promoted through ethnorelativism and integration, a new form of cultural identity can be developed to describe the processes of “being” and “becoming” in diaspora literature. As mentioned before, American society can no longer be viewed as a melting pot, and any attempts at creating a so-called “common culture” are futile in the wake of digital transformation and globalization. The last fifty years have funneled highly qualified immigrants, especially from South Asia, into the U.S. whose offspring is now no longer willing to accept the second-class citizenship that was accorded to their parents upon their first arrival to the U.S. These new non-white Americans are changing the idea of what it means to be American and to embrace the true meaning of equality granted to all its citizens by the U.S. constitution. Literary productions by these new generation Americans vocally and unreservedly question modern America’s cultural, political, and financial hegemony. This new generation has rejected the submissiveness of their parents and has decided to take matters into their own hands and create their own destiny. Authors like Ayad Akhtar and Haroon Moghul, among others, are raising consciousness among the diaspora to stop accepting rejection by the dominant groups and take control of their future as American citizens with equal rights in the land of opportunity many cultures, races, and ethnicities call home. Such writers advocate the concept of interculturality through their literary and non-literary works where there is a mutually reciprocal relationship between the white and the other Americans, where people want to transform the American dream, shape a new dream together. The characters of immigrant children represented in this new wave of South Asian American writers no longer wish to survive merely. They are also not afraid to question the imbalances in power, for they can now meaningfully contribute, dialog, debate, and transform society alongside the dominant group. If brown faces like those of Hasan Minhaj and Priyanka Chopra have entered the mainstream American media, then brown elite CEOs like Google’s Sundar Pichai and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella are leading corporations at the crux of changing human understanding of the future world. In the process, no one has been left unchanged, and in the real and imagined narratives, people are beginning to examine the understanding of their own culture. This has resulted in personal and collective transformation through deep learning, 89 demonstrating the move from ethnocentrism and assimilation towards ethnorelativism and integration. To describe this new type of persona, Kim (2001, 2008, 2015) has theorized the phenomenon of intercultural personhood, which can be meaningfully applied to understand the ontological aspects among South Asian Muslim Americans and their successive generations. At its very core, “intercultural identity is employed as a counterpoint to, and as an extension of, cultural identity, and as a concept that represents the phenomenon of identity adaptation and transformation beyond the perimeters of the conventional, categorical conception of cultural identity” (Kim 2008:359). The concept of intercultural personhood is based on the systems theory approach, which posits that humans are complex beings that are constantly evolving. By extension, the same properties of complex systems can also be applied to human culture. “Plasticity, the ability to learn and change through new experiences, is highlighted as one of the most profound characteristics of the human mind and is the very basis upon which individuals acquire an identity” (Kim 2008:362-363). Further, the theorization of such a persona is based on the constructionist approach where individuals create dynamic relationships, both within their own groups and with the other groups leading to “a dynamic, adaptive, and transformative identity conception—one that conjoins and integrates, rather than separates and divides” (Kim 2008:360). Here, the individual is not confined to a narrow and singular view of cultural identity rather their fate and identities are intertwined and interdependent with all groups with which they share the geographical and virtual spaces of coexistence. In a sense, it blends cultural identity with both social identity and group identity, thereby allowing us to conceptualize a more holistic approach toward understanding the personal and psychological aspects of identity among diasporic individuals. As our societies and nation-states transition from multiculturalism to pluralism, we need to change our theorization of cultural identity from the realm of the individual to that of collective social personhood. Here the individual is an extension of the larger social group, and societies can accommodate and function with diversity and plurality in institutions, politics, education, business, thus highlighting the true essence of interculturalism. However, pluralism is not sufficient in itself and has its own problems and biases. Kim (2008) highlights two such issues by means of positivity bias and oversimplification inherent in the academic research on pluralism, which seems to be somewhat different from the reality experienced by diasporic individuals. To promote fairness, justice, morality, and equality for minority groups, there is a tendency to knowingly or unknowingly ignore the negative connotations associated with cultural identity. The intellectual aspects fail to see the conservationism associated with a focus on preserving culture, be it the dominant culture or the minority culture, or the moral factors are more concerned with ensuring that societies remain liberal and that there is no place for oppression or injustice. While these are great ideals, we need to understand that, individuals identify with a group in a manner that is self-serving. The way people experience cultural identity is essentially not a rational but an emotionally driven experience. When it comes to our relationships with an outgroup in competition or conflict, we are less than likely to be fair and objective and more likely to be irrational and defensive, favoring our ingroup and discriminating against the outgroup that threatens our ingroup. (Kim 2008:361) The U.S. is no exception to this ideology positioning and suffers from positivity bias like other Western nation-states. Secondly, in discussing the oversimplification aspects of pluralism, there is a tendency among the current academic discourse, 96 through a process of life-long negotiation, a shared identity emerges from the identities of diasporic individuals and groups, thereby juxtaposing the concepts of transnationalism and identity (Vertovec 2001). In AD, A. Akhtar portrays the reality of a transcultural nation struggling with the reemergence of religion among the second-generation diaspora who are no longer immigrants. The novel does not offer any single interpretation of identity and ends with a metanarrative alluding to the transculturation of faiths and cultural heritages. The narrative opens with an interfaith relationship between Hayat, a Muslim character, and Rachel, a Jewish character, and towards the end, speculates their future in the words of Hayat to the reader as “[o]ur wonderful and troubled interfaith romance is a tale for another time” (AD 329). The transnational then becomes the transcultural because, for these members of the South Asian diaspora, it is not a simple matter of succumbing to the hegemonic American culture or merely losing their own culture. Instead, they forge their own unique identities as inheritors and creators of hybrid and fluid cultures culminating in tertiary cultures, which can be grouped under the broad umbrella of a transculturation framework. They move from developing plural and multicultural identities to forming constantly evolving transcultural identities that continuously redefine, shift, and at times merge the center and the margins. Such a concept of transculturation was introduced by Fernando Ortiz (1940), a Cuban anthropologist, to make sense of the cultural hybridity and complexity of races and cultures that constitute the Cuban identity. However, the term is appropriate to diasporic individuals from all cultures trying to shape their ontological processes of “being” and “becoming” in foreign lands. Ortiz (1940) contends: I am of the opinion that the word transculturation better expresses the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is what the English word acculturation really implies, but the process also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be defined as deculturation. In addition, it carries the idea of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called neoculturation. (102-103) In a sense mentioned above, transculturation is more suited to studying cultural identity in diasporic communities and building effective, ethical, and responsible global citizenship dialogs. There is a two-way interaction between cultures being created beyond the center in a fused, permeable, and collective transcultural space that absorbs and dissipates different values, traditions, and norms through cultural osmosis. Identities for transcultural individuals “cut across distinct frames of reference; multiple identities which have recourse to several cultures; attachments which link up discrete cultural territory: such transgressions bring to crisis a traditional understanding of culture and have, for some time now, promoted conceptualizations of transculture” (Stein 2009:253). There has been much research on transculturalism in cultural studies (Ortiz 1940; Cuccioletta 2001; Reichardt 2017; Slimbach 2005; Lewis 2002) and transcultural literary studies (Dagnino 2012, 2013, 2015; Fischer 2016; Pettersson 2008; Nordin et al. 2013). Furthermore, Bond and Rapson (2014) have used the term ‘transcultural turn’ to respond to the need for new vocabulary and concepts to deal with the novel and complex realities unfolding before us at an accelerating pace. In the last twenty years, the transcultural turn has manifested itself in many cultural and literary studies areas. The notion of transculturalism intersects multiple disciplines and is well suited to respond to the challenges faced by diasporic individuals in the twenty-first century in making sense of the changes occurring in lived and imagined realities. Dagnino (2012) argues: In this light, transculturalism, understood in its broader and all-encompassing way, might be deployed as a concept for creative culture-making, an instrument for cultural identity formation, a mode of experiencing 97 one’s cultural identity and an analytical/critical tool able to capture the interplay between culture, the different modes of modernity, and the works of a globalized imagination and sense of citizenship. (13) As discussed in the first part of this dissertation, globalization has turned our attention from complex culture to cultural complexity and hybridity. Vauclair et al. (2014) offer an attractive theoretical perspective building on Cuccioletta’s (2001) concept of transculturalism based on the existence of ‘metissage’ among the culturally diverse populations in Canada and the U.S. The term refers to the ability of individuals to view the transcendental aspect of culture, resulting in the combination of values, norms, and traditions from multiple cultures. In this sense, in AD, transculturalism facilitates the formation of unique cultural insights for Mina and Hayat. These characters are not bound to a particular culture, whether Pakistani, American, Islamic, Jewish, or Sufi, but their worldviews echo all the different cultures surrounding the myriad experiences through their journeys of personal growth, “being,” and “becoming.” This makes Hayat culturally adaptable and capable of navigating the inconsistencies and conflicts he encounters in his daily life when dealing with multiple cultures. For example, unlike his other Muslim classmates, Hayat is not perturbed by his college professor’s lecture about discovering an alternative version of the Quran. Hayat aspires to become a hafiz, but he memorizes the Quran in English. When he is mocked about it at the mosque, his aunt Mina reminds him that one’s intention is more important than the language one speaks in spiritual matters. Mina says that “[b]eing a hafiz is not what matters. It’s the quality of your faith. Not the name you put on it” (AD 307). Hayat’s relationship with Rachel, a Jewish classmate, marks an essential milestone in his identarian development. At the end of the novel, Hayat declares, “It was in Rachel’s arms—and it was with her love—that I finally discovered myself not only as a man, but as an American” (AD 329). The presence of such a “transcultural approach to the self as an open-ended process” (Dagnino 2012:6) in the novel requires us to move away from the traditional notions of fixed belonging and non-permeable cultural practices. As seen in the preceding chapter, multicultural identity focuses on conventional aspects such as national, ethnic, and racial identity instead of the cultural agnostic foundation of the transcultural identity. And while interculturalism provides an excellent alternative to the problems left unsolved by multiculturalism, it still does not help us adequately deal with the ontological and developmental challenges faced by diasporic individuals in the age of globalization and digital transformation during late modernity. However, before we further analyze transcultural identity in AD, it is essential to briefly clarify the differences between multiculturalism, interculturalism, and transculturalism. Wolfgang Welsch describes transculturality as “the most adequate concept of culture today – for both political and normative reasons” (Welsch 1999, 194). Rejecting any notion of culture as territorially bound, Welsch contends (in terms reminiscent of both Eliot and Bhabha) that [c]ultures today are in general characterized by hybridization. For every culture, all other cultures have technically come to be inner-content or satellites” (1999, 198). Transculturality thus differs from either interculturality (which “seeks ways in which [different] cultures could nevertheless get on with, understand and recognize one another” (1999, 195)) or multiculturality (which “takes up the problems which different cultures have living together within one society” (1999, 196)), by refusing to subscribe to any separatist notion of cultures as discrete and impermeable entities. Resisting the idea that either values or lifestyles can be contained within any form of border (be it national, economic, ethnic or religious), Welsch argues “for a multimeshed and inclusive, not separatist and exclusive understanding of culture [...] whose pragmatic features exist not in delimitation, but in the ability to link and undergo transition” (1999, 200). (Bond and Rapson 2014:13-14) 98 A pertinent conceptualization of transcultural identity is offered by Vauclair et al. (2014), who define it as a more personal construct based on an individual’s interaction with multiple cultures rather than a social construct. The three reasons for such a theorization are: different people have different cultural experiences in the same situation. The ability to learn from these experiences and process any differences and conflicts is not the same for everyone. Furthermore, people choose what they want to embrace as a part of their identity autonomously and consciously. AD describes the journey of Mina’s dhikr 42 to become a dervish. Mina is both traditional and liberal in matters of religion, and for her, “faith wasn’t about the outer forms. She didn’t wear a head scarf” (AD 50). Mina is unable to fast because of medical issues, but she finds ways to remain faithful to the intention behind Ramadan by depriving herself of things that she loves. She does this “in order to feel that quickening of the will–and the deepening of one’s gratitude–that she said were the reasons we Muslims fasted” (AD 50). Mina’s resultant transcultural identity is fluid. It changes depending on new cultural experiences by rejecting existing norms, values, and traditions and embracing new ones to grow the “self” further. Hayat’s characterization of Mina is that she is “a paradox I couldn’t resolve, my opposing ideas of her—enlightened and devout; intrepid and passive—only ever colliding, and never sitting comfortably enough for me to hold them at all, let alone function” (AD 324). Mina takes personal responsibility for all her actions and is content with all her decisions taken of her free will. Her interpretation of Islam leans more towards Sufism. In this way, Mina exhibits a transcultural identity where she sees everything as an expression of Allah’s will no matter what country or circumstance she finds herself in. She comes to the U.S. to escape a bad marriage in Pakistan; falls in love with Nathan but cannot marry him; ultimately marries a conservative Muslim man in the U.S. who abuses her physically and mentally, eventually driving her to her deathbed. Yet, Mina counsels Hayat when he goes to see her at the hospital during her last days: Faith has never been about an afterlife for me, Hayat. It’s about finding God now. In the everyday. Here. With you. Whether I’m living in a prison or in a castle. Sick or healthy. It’s all the same. That’s what the Sufis teach. What comes our way, whatever it is, that is the vehicle. Every single life, no matter how big or small, how happy or how sad, it can be a path to Him. (AD 326) Since the choice always remains with Mina, her identity is more personal and does not necessarily resonate with the collective social identity of the dominant group. Mina is an advocate of ijtihad, or personal interpretation in practicing religion. She chooses to become a beautician when she arrives in the U.S. and even divorces her first husband. She could not have done this in Pakistan. Still, when she is heartbroken after splitting with Nathan, it appears that she purposely chooses to inflict suffering by marrying Sunil to follow the path of the Sufis. From the tenth century onwards, orthodox Islam prohibits any innovations in religion from personal interpretation, but as 42 Dhikr, also spelled [z]ikr, (Arabic: “reminding oneself,” or “mention”), ritual prayer or litany practiced by Muslim mystics (Ṣūfīs) for the purpose of glorifying God and achieving spiritual perfection. Based on the Qurʾānic injunctions “Remind thyself [udhkur] of thy Lord when thou forgettest” (18:24) and “O ye who believe! Remember [udhkurū] Allāh with much remembrance” (33:41), the dhikr is essentially a “remembering” of God by the frequent repetition of his names. Originally a simple recitation of the Qurʾān and various religious writings among ascetics and mystics, the dhikr gradually became a formula (e.g., lā ilāha illa ʾllāh, “there is no god but God”; Allāhu akbar, “God is greatest”; al-ḥamdu līʾllāh, “praise be to God”; astaghfiru ʾllāh, “I ask God’s forgiveness”), repeated aloud or softly, accompanied by prescribed posture and breathing. As the Ṣūfī brotherhoods (ṭarīqahs) were established, each adopted a particular dhikr, to be recited in solitude (e.g., following each of the five obligatory daily prayers) or as a community. The dhikr, like fikr (meditation), is a method the Ṣūfī may use in his striving to achieve oneness with God (Encyclopedia Britannica “Dhikr”). 99 far as Mina is concerned “these ‘gates’ could never be closed, because they were the gates that led to the Lord. ‘Somebody just said they were closed. I walk through them as I please,’ she added.” (AD 51). The transcultural identity of the different characters in AD can be compared to a mosaic pattern, where the different identities merge to form a new identity based on a collection of multiple cultural experiences and the resultant learning. The outstanding features are therefore the personal and cognitive aspects of cultural identity formation among individuals inhabiting multiple cultural spaces such as Mina and Hayat. In order to describe the behavior and internal representation among transcultural individuals, Vauclair et al. (2014) build upon Lücke et al.’s (2013) model of cognitive patterns resulting from multicultural experiences: “compartmentalization (separate cultural cognitions), integration (interconnected cultural cognitions), inclusion (enhanced home cultural cognitions with added foreign culture elements), convergence (merged cultural cognitions consisting in overlapping schemas), and generalization (new cultural cognitions of meta-cultural schemas)” (Vauclair et al. 2014:16). This is consistent with the transcendental, autonomous, cognitive, generalized, and fluid aspects of dealing with cultural similarities and differences in Hayat’s immediate family, including his parents and aunt. The developmental aspects in such individuals do not focus on the deep knowledge of the specific cultural content but instead focus on their ability to form connections between various cultural schemata, thus highlighting the capacity to handle cognitive structures. In AD, we have characters with multiple cognitive skills. There are rationalist humanists like Hayat’s father, who completely rejects religion and takes no interest in his son's religious education, and Nathan, who is willing to convert from Judaism to Islam for the sake of Mina. There are literalists like the cleric Souhef who use verses from the Quran out-of-context and create an anti-Semitic atmosphere that breaks Mina and Nathan apart, and Sunil, who follows an orthodox and tribal version of Islam. And finally, there is the mystic like Mina, who deliberately meets a tragic end despite being in complete control of her present. The transnational, transcultural, and cosmopolitan aspect of the novel lies in how these extremist reactions are dealt with by its more rationalist and mystic characters. Furthermore, in terms of defining and understanding the developmental and ontological processes among diasporic individuals such as Mina and Hayat, Epstein’s (2009) conceptualization of trans-postmodernism is well suited to deal with cultural identities that transcend our traditional understanding of space and time in the context of transcultural individuals inhabiting multiple realities. In considering the names that might be used to designate the new era following “postmodernism,” one finds that the prefix “trans” stands out specially. The last third of the twentieth century developed under the sign of “post,” which signaled the demise of such concepts of modernity as “truth” and “objectivity,” “soul” and “subjectivity,” “utopia” and “ideality,” “primary origin” and “originality,” “sincerity” and “sentimentality.” All of these concepts are now being reborn in the form of “trans-subjectivity,” “trans-idealism,” “transutopianism,” “trans-originality,” “trans-lyricism,” “trans-sentimentality,” etc. (Epstein and Genis 2016: 546547) Their transcultural identity draws from multiple sources of knowledge and worldviews. We see in AD that despite being foregrounded by Islam, the characters are not fundamentalists. They have learned to rationally distinguish the literal meaning of Quranic verses quoted in Friday sermons at their American mosque. And although they participate in transcultural Islamic gatherings of Muslim immigrants from many different countries, their primary objective is to seek a sense of community rather than righteousness. We learn that Hayat’s maternal grandfather spent time in London with Jews during the second world war. He taught his children that intellectual curiosity was compatible with religious rituals. “[T]hinking did not have to weaken one’s bond to tradition 100 but could actually strengthen it” (AD 103) and the popularly held belief “that pursuing knowledge for its own sake was the sure sign one had fallen from the straight path leading to God” (AD 103) was not valid. Further reading of Epstein’s theory suggests a more pragmatic approach to deciphering trans-postmodernism and, by extension, transculturalism. It cautions about the complexity of what lies ahead of us and to be mindful of the failures of multiculturalism which has not necessarily helped the cause of modern diasporic individuals and their postmodern offspring. It also lacks relevance to conceptualizations of identity definition among the postpostmodern generation, such as AD’s author A. Akhtar and its protagonist Hayat. Epstein and Genis (2016) argue that: This new lyricism, however, is not the kind that surges forth spontaneously from the soul; this idealism does not proudly soar above the world; this utopianism is not like the one at the beginning of the twentieth century, which aggressively sought to reconstruct the world. It is an “as if” lyricism, an “as if” idealism, an “as if” utopianism, aware of its own failures, insubstantiality, and secondariness. (546-547) Second-generation transcultural diasporic individuals such as Hayat must deal with multiple cultures and numerous forms of social phenomenon that eventually result in the multiple and cyclic nature of their identity. The same patterns need to be repeated for each experience that the “self” discovers, whereby the already complex threads of “being” start to converge into an infinite and interminable process of “becoming.” The “trans” aspect of transculturalism and transcultural identity becomes a personal rather than a social phenomenon of self-expression for Hayat. It is manifested in terms of who he is and how he chooses to tell his story of who he is becoming and who he will become. Hayat memorizes the Quran to save his parents from hellfire; he betrays Mina for the sake of religion that, breaks up Mina’s relationship with Nathan; he stops believing in Islam but still takes classes in Islamic history; he does not lose faith; he still remembers verses from the Quran despite not having opened the book in ten years; and he may even marry Rachel, a Jewish girl. Epstein and Genis (2016) posit that: Nevertheless, these “trans” phenomena want to come to self-expression in the form of repetition. Paradoxically as it may sound, it is precisely through repetition that they reclaim their primacy and authenticity. Tired gestures, which are no longer automatized, as in the poetics of postmodernism, are replete with their own lyricism. In repetition, in quotation, there is a naturalness, a simplicity, an inevitability which is lacking in a primary act, born of effort and with claims to revelation. (546-547) In conclusion, in the contemporary world and South Asian American novels such as AD, we see that new cultural forms are constantly evolving. These result in a fusion at multiple levels, displacing the location of mainstream culture from the old center to a new center without any fixed boundaries and certainly with fluid margins. Bhabha’s postcolonial conceptualization of a “third space” where the old cultural norms, values, customs, and traditions can be “appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew” (1994:55) needs to be questioned. For it isn’t merely about looking at culture from a different perspective; instead, it is about understanding the impact of a newly created culture on the identity of diasporic individuals. Stein (2009) argues: Bhabha’s notion of cultural translation has a narrower scope than the concept of transculturation employed here; it merely entails the revision of reference, norm, and value systems, whereas transculturation denotes the creation of these systems anew. But transculturation also institutes and follows new rules of transformation in producing new regimes of reference, norm, and value, regimes that draw upon several cultural backgrounds. In such an evolved context, cultural authenticity and authority are denaturalized and require reconstruction. (264) 101 Considering the importance and relevance of transculturalism to the reality and imagination of the twenty-first century, literary scholars need to delve further into the analysis of transcultural identity in transcultural literature that mirrors the experience of today’s diasporic individuals, their families, and their successive generations. Whether we are “[r]eady or not, a “transcultural” era is upon us” (Slimbach 2005:205), and “[t]ransculturalism is rooted in the quest to define shared interests and common values across cultural and national borders. (…) to address consequential global issues such as personal prejudice, group violence, environmental protection, and human rights” (Slimbach 2005:206). Our future “selves” cannot escape the increasing presence of transnational and transcultural forces in the field of culture, economics, politics as migration becomes a reality of late modernity. The expatriates of the old world were defined by one sending country and one dominant set of cultural experiences. The emerging epoch will increasingly demand transpatriates—persons who move between the multiple cultures, fashioning identities that are dynamic and porous. The test of transculturalism is to think outside the box of one’s motherland, seeing many sides of every question without abandoning conviction, and allowing for a chameleon sense of self without losing one’s cultural center. (Slimbach 2005:211) AD is a highly intertextual transcultural novel and requires knowledge of all three Abrahamic faiths, which are presented as a continuous heteroglossial whole. Despite being written in the first person and having many similarities with the author’s own story, AD is a fictional narrative. This is made explicit in the title by adding the words “A Novel” after “American Dervish.” The novel is divided into four books, the first named after Milton’s Paradise Lost. The narrative progressively describes Hayat’s fall from belief to disbelief in Islam and Mina’s transformation into a Dervish symbolizing the restoration of faith and spirituality in the story. The writing style also resembles a play wherein each Book is divided into chapters that are akin to a theatrical act. Following Dagnino (2015), from a narratological viewpoint, AD tends to follow a non-linear narrative that appears to be fragmented “where the storyline (or, in many cases, a storyboard particularly adaptable to our ever-growing visual imaginations and cinematic transpositions) is exploded in multiple layers of meaning” (182). It is debatable who is being referred to as a Dervish, Hayat, or Mina? Furthermore, despite being a novel about a Muslim American family, a significant part of the narrative is devoted to Judaism, its impact on Muslim characters, its role in the U.S. vis-à-vis Islam, and the global perception of Jews by Muslims from different parts of the Islamic world. The prologue describes the discovery of an alternative text of the Quran in Yemen, contrasting it with the widely held notion of the holy book being the definitive written word of God. The Hadith Qudsi 43 included in the epigraph alludes to deconstructing the esoteric meaning by combining and contrasting the Quran with other revelations narrated by Prophet Muhammad that can be directly attributed to God. This further highlights the nonuniqueness of the Quranic word and the importance of multiple divine sources that need to be interpreted to find true meaning. The novel’s title alludes to a Sufi version of Islam where the focus is on entering an ecstatic trance to achieve higher meaning. The word Quran itself is mentioned 114 times in the novel, reminding us of the same number of chapters present in the holy book. For 43 Hadith Qudsi is a “sacred tradition or report. Also called hadith rabbani or hadith ilahi (divine hadith). Refers to a saying (hadith) of the Prophet Muhammad in which the meaning is revealed by God and the phrasing is formulated by the Prophet. Unlike prophetic hadith (hadith nabawi), the chain of transmission is traced back directly to God instead of ending with the Prophet. In contrast to the Quran, which is considered divine revelation in both meaning and wording, the authenticity of sacred hadith varies from one narration to another, and they may not be recited in prayer. They function as extra-Quranic revelation (Oxford Dictionary of Islam “Hadith Qudsi”). 102 Hayat, memorizing the Quran is redemptive, as shown by his recitation of Chapter Ninety-Four 44 on solace or comfort in the epilogue. Hayat says, “[a]s I walked with the wind, verses from the Quran I’d not recalled or thought about for more than ten years echoed inside me, unbidden” (AD 335). Interestingly, the choice of names of the two main characters is significant to the process of identity (re)construction in the novel. Hayat means life indicating the process of “being,” and Mina alludes to the tent city in Mecca where the pilgrims stay over many nights before they ascend to Mount Arafa during the annual pilgrimage of Hajj, reflecting on their past, present, and the future, indicating the strategies of “becoming.” Dagnino (2015) argues that by imaginatively tracing a “web of narrative transcultural routes, transcultural authors help us realize that as citizens of a globalized world, we can develop and expand our sense of cultural identity and, possibly, reach a transcultural dimension” (183). In AD, the transcultural motifs are revealed through five distinct techniques of narrative representation, as detailed by Dagnino (2015). The novel is located in multiple geographies and cultural milieus and reflects the author’s own transnational experience and relationship with Islam. Most characters are exposed to multiple cultures. This results in the transformation of the “self” when they come in contact with the “other.” Despite her Islamic upbringing, Mina is transformed by American literature and culture and falls in love with a Jewish man. Hayat’s mother narrates the virtues of Judaism in its treatment of women and Hayat also falls in love with a Jewish girl. Transcultural novels “look at the different, often complex aspects or concerns of life from a multiplicity of angles by interweaving in their texts a plurality of voices or by exposing the subtle interplay of their characters’ multiple identities” (Dagnino 2015:186). In AD, multiple approaches to faith are presented, and the characters often depict juxtaposed identities signaling a plurality of voices. A. Akhtar also intentionally engages by inserting foreign words from Urdu and Arabic into the narratives, but he also intersperses the story with verses from the Quran, hadiths by Prophet Muhammad, and stories of other prophets. Dagnino (2015) posits that such a “choice reveals a psychological enfranchisement from the dominant language in which these writers write their works, as well as the openness and lack of inhibition to think, imagine, and communicate through other linguistic codes and worldviews” (187-188). As discussed above, A. Akhtar is trying to establish continuity and similarities in the three major Abrahamic faiths. Finally, as a transcultural novel, it is hard to fit AD into a single national or religious context – American, Pakistani, Islamic, or Jewish. It blurs boundaries, questions established notions of religion and religiosity, and forces us to reconsider our understanding of hyphenated identities. It may be “best understood as the creation, re-creation, and interlacing of diverse cultural landscapes through which the author and the readers are able to see things from different perspectives” (Dagnino 2015:189). Therefore, all transcultural motifs described above are extensively present in AD: in its style, narrative technique, structure, narrative voices as well as focalization. 44 All the verses quoted in AD including the ones from Chapter 94 are Akhtar’s own personal inspirations as seen through the eyes of the fictional characters that he has created as mentioned in the Acknowledgement section of the novel. 103 2.3 Return to Roots, Bearing Witness, and Transcultural Personhood Among South Asian Muslim Americans in Nafisa Haji’s The Writing on My Forehead Umm—what you just said—isn’t that only true in the short term? I mean—who remembers the news when they read a novel? The news at the time it was published? Does anyone know about the war that was taking place in the background of Pride and Prejudice? Even novels that seem to be grounded in the context of history can be read without much reference to the news of the day—like Tolstoy, for example. His stories stand alone—and most people who read them today have no idea what was going on in the newspapers at the time. Excepting what the authors chose. Nafisa Haji, The Writing on My Forehead Nafisa Haji’s first novel, The Writing on My Forehead (TWOMF), published in 2010, was a finalist for the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award. Haji, a second-generation American of Indo-Pakistani descent, was born and raised in the U.S. when her parents moved to Los Angeles from Karachi in the late 1960s. Haji was not formally trained as a creative writer but pursued an undergraduate degree in American History and was an elementary school teacher until she delved fully into writing fiction. Her work features the themes of transcultural identity, belonging, religion, and gender roles for today’s Muslim American women. TWOMF is set across three continents, from Pakistan to England to North America, recounting the stories of three generations of women across different points in time. The narrator and protagonist, Saira Qader rejects the traditional roles of family, duty, destiny, and confinement attributed to Muslim women. Instead, she pursues a career in journalism that takes her worldwide. She works closely with Mohsin, her paternal cousin and a photographer, who lives in the U.K. and is deeply interested in preserving the legacy of their previous generations. Their paternal grandfather had written a journal entry on the day Mohsin was born urging him to “bear witness,” and this forms a central theme of the narrative throughout the novel. On this day was born my grandson, Mohsin. An auspicious birth, he brought with him a sister. It is on your shoulders, my son, that I rest all of my hopes for the future. Do not fail me in your efforts for what is right and what is just. Bear witness to their opposite, to evil and injustice, which are one and the same. Bear witness so that they may not be committed with impunity. Whatever path your journey takes, do not succumb to the seduction of indifference to suffering, which authorizes evil. (TWOMF 140) The novel recounts the family’s life events and intersects the narrative with defining world events such as the partition of the subcontinent, the feminist movement in the West, and the impact of 9/11 on Muslim Americans. Despite moving away physically and emotionally from her family, Saira’s life is guided by her mother’s maternal aunt, a woman ahead of her time in Pakistan, and the English family of her maternal grandfather in the U.K., both having led transcultural lives in their time. Like Haji herself, who served on the board of Freedom Forward 45 , an organization that helps ensure that American ideals of freedom are aligned with the reality of American foreign policy, Saira too views the world from a transcultural lens and aspires to make a difference in her personal and professional spheres after the death of her sister in a post-9/11 hate crime. 45 https://freedomforward.org 104 TWOMF contrasts the postcolonial histories of both India and Pakistan and the cultural revolution that took place in the U.K in the eighties while juxtaposing the events of the transcultural reality in the post-9/11 era, especially for the second-generation Muslim diaspora. In the late twentieth century, the cultural turn has redefined the importance of and repositioned the stature of cultural and literary studies by mainstreaming “the causal and socially constitutive role of cultural processes and systems of signification” (Steinmetz 1999:1-2). This was done to make sense of a postmodern and poststructuralist world when globalization and technological innovations were still in their infancy and multiculturalism was posing a challenge in Western countries with a history of postcolonialism such as the U.K. and France in the Old Continent, and the U.S. in the New World. However, we now pose this question: Are we ready for a transcultural turn? We live in T. Turner’s (1995) “post-postmodern” times where the spatiality of borders and boundaries has changed dramatically. Physical and virtual connectivity has seen unprecedented penetration in our daily existence, heralding the age of what Kirby (2008, 2009) calls “pseudomodernism” or “digimodernism.” Colonialism is being replaced by terrorist fanaticism, whether state-sponsored or ideological, or religious. This, in turn has sparked new ethical concerns that call for new strategies such as Gans’ (2009) theory on “post-millennialism” to counter anti-terrorist racial profiling and victimization of Arabs in particular and Muslims in general. The space and time we live in today are very different from the notion of cultural studies envisioned by the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and its members. The great philosophers and thinkers of this movement have undoubtedly broadened the scope of culture from merely the appreciation of high arts. They have positioned cultural studies and culturalism at the forefront of sociological, anthropological, and political theories and debates. Now more than ever before, it seems opportune to envision a post-Gramscian and post-Foucauldian perspective to make sense of our future “selves” or at least attempt to do so to discover what lies beyond the postmodern and poststructuralist imagination and reality. If Stuart Hall (1980, 1997) has categorically and unreservedly claimed the presence of a political agenda in the field of cultural studies, it also seems apt to reevaluate the significance of and, the importance attached to ideology, power, and hegemony in a world where other forms of oppressions have replaced postcolonialism. It, therefore, ensues that our future and our identity have taken on new meanings while dealing with the positive, neutral, and negative demands of globalization and digitalization. In the last two decades, the Internet has changed communication media taking the ‘digital’ to a level where the message emanates globally at the click of a button by anyone privileged enough to access a smartphone. “We have an economic concept, a political concept, yet the one that remains the most important in our Global Village, the question of multiple identities without barriers, based on the movement and flow of peoples and of society is absent” (Cuccioletta 2001/2002:9). This gap can be addressed by Lewis’ (2002) conceptualization of transculturalism and the significance of language wars (Lewis 2010) against the cultural transformation resulting from the crisis in the global mediasphere (Lewis 2011) born out of the cultural fluidity and constantly evolving cultural dynamics in the twenty-first century. As discussed before, in a multicultural identity, “being” is based on difference, and the focus is on creating an environment for accommodating multiple cultural groups. In contrast, a transcultural identity deals with both differences and similarities, permitting the acquisition of new forms of “being” through “knowing” in multiple homelands. TWOMF weaves a transcultural web of stories across the native homeland as Saira thinks about India while she wanders through her house in the suburbs of Los Angeles. “Mother India, where both Mummy and Daddy were born, was the source of all Mummy’s improbable fables. Stories that always ended with a twist – of fateful, karmic proportions” 105 (TWOMF 7). The worldviews of Saira’s mother and sister are pretty traditional despite having spent their entire adult lives in the U.S. But Saira constantly questions her mother’s truth to adapt and adopt these discourses, values, ideas, and knowledge systems to her American reality. In the novel, she articulates her position as: Yet, from the beginning, I resisted. I focused instead on tangents—on pirates and glass eyes. Later, I was much too preoccupied by the whats, wheres, whos, and whys of the plots, stopping Mummy often to interrupt, focusing always on what she considered to be the unimportant details. (TWOMF 7-8) Saira’s maternal grandfather was a religious man, but he was drawn to Western culture and took on a white woman in England as his second wife. Saira is constantly reminded by her mother that “[w]hen you forget the rules of your culture, you lose it. You forget about what is right and wrong. You forget that the reason we are here is not just to enjoy ourselves selfishly” (TWOMF 14). Saira believes that to be true to her “identity” as a Muslim American; she must create a new shared culture through simultaneous deculturation of her parents’ ways of “being” with a métissage of her journey of “becoming” (Ortiz 1995). She breaks all rules set forth by her family; she is the only one to travel to her half-sister’s wedding in Karachi; she gets pregnant and delivers a baby girl Sakina out of wedlock. Sakina is raised by Saira’s sister Ameena, and we only find out at the end of the novel after Ameena’s tragic death that Sakina is Saira’s daughter. The narrative is cyclical, and Saira faces the same dilemmas as the previous generations of women in her family. Lewis (2002) offers a pertinent theoretical framework with certain vital characteristics of transculturalism that provide a strong foundation for conceptualizing transcultural identity among diasporic individuals. Although these characteristics are meant to guide the transcultural critic in their investigation in cultural studies, we can also draw parallels with the developmental and ontological processes to analyze how such a transcultural identity is formed and manifested in diasporic individuals. Lewis (2002) posits that transculturalism exposes the problems of the dominant culture by questioning the sources of power that influence our knowledge of the world. Saira’s mother, Shabana from Los Angeles, and her sister Jamila from London and Lubna from Karachi have invented alternative ways of creating and distributing meanings across cultures. In their, every conversation “sentences began in Urdu and ended in English with liberal lingual hybridization sandwiched in between, which none of them had any trouble following” (TWOMF 17-18). This intermingling of language is reflected throughout the novel as a means of indirectly highlighting cultural crossover. Urdu words are used to describe the extreme emotional state of characters depicting the unconscious straddling between linguistic boundaries. References to Islamic rituals are made in a manner such that they transform the practice of everyday Islamic traditions as a part of the quotidian in America. The other side of the 9/11 debate is represented in the narrative from a Pakistani American perspective exposing the realities of life for South Asian Muslim Americans in the U.S. The Muslim response to the 9/11 tragedy in the novel is portrayed through arguments based on hearsay and logical analysis based on historical facts. In this sense, transculturalism also allows groups and individuals to experience and deal with the tensions that arise out of dissonant forms of logic. Saira has become a journalist because simple explanations have always made her uneasy. She narrates, “[f]or years I have traveled the world, uncovering the details overlooked by others, avoiding the details of my own past” (TWOMF 15), unlike her mother’s neat and tidy stories without the details that don’t serve any moral purpose. In response to the demands of cultural complexity and hybridity in the contemporary era, “transculturalism is as interested in dissonance, tension, and instability as it is with the stabilizing effects of social conjunction, communalism, and 112 2.4 Religious Identity Among South Asian Muslim Americans in Tahira Naqvi’s Dying in a Strange Country Her eyes shut, she found herself in another dwelling, a portion of land where her husband and so many of her relatives were resting. Dismal, overgrown with weeds and wildly tangled shrubbery, the only color was brought into the place by those who came to visit the graves. A red tinge from a dupatta here, a green kurta, a dab of purple chador, a brightly white cotton shirt, spotless like a new shroud. The earth here was dry, cakey and cracking, gashed where the pressure from the countless heavy stone mounds had dragged it open. The ocher of the earth presented no other hue. The trees that bent over the crumbling graves in postured of despair, were thin and untended, their spindly branches forever bare and shriveled. Spring seemed not to touch them, even lightly. It was like a place forgotten, by time, by nature, by life. The tall brick wall that enclaved the cemetery and which half stood, and half fell, as everything else did there, seemed to shut out nature’s benevolence just as it shut out the living world. Tahira Naqvi, Dying in a Strange Country The rich imagery in the above lines about a cemetery reveals the metaphorical importance of forging an identity based on religious beliefs. This identity continues to exist even after death. The homeland amorphously extends beyond the physical world as revealed to Prophet Muhammad in the Quran (2:156) “Indeed to God do we belong, and indeed, to Him we are returning.” 49 Muslims commonly recite this verse upon hearing the news of a deceased as a mark of compassion for the surviving family members. Tahira Naqvi is a first-generation Pakistani American short story writer, a prolific translator of works from Urdu to English, and an educator living in the United States since the 1970s. She is currently working on her first novel A Hot Wind. Naqvi’s short stories have appeared in many journals and have been included in several anthologies on South Asian women writers. Her collection of short stories Dying in a Strange Country (DIASC), published in 2001, primarily portrays the immigrant experience of the first-generation Pakistani community in the U.S. As the title suggests, death is an important theme that runs through the book – the fear of death in a foreign country as well as the fear of death of one’s native culture and traditions. The theme of religious identity – in terms of why it is essential to retain it and how American culture is incompatible with Islam – from the viewpoint of a visiting aged aunt from Pakistan is present in every story, whether it is set in Connecticut or Lahore. The views of the so-called cultural outsiders from Pakistan are juxtaposed with the newly arrived Pakistani American immigrants and how the latter adapt their religious identity to the practicalities of American culture. Although this is a collection of short stories, in reality, it is a novella with recurring characters, multiple voices, traversing several geographies and generations. More than a narrative of longing for Pakistan, the stories represent a 49 This phrase is a part of a series of verses from 155 to 157 in Chapter 2 of the Quran. “And most surely We shall test all of you believers with something of fear and with hunger and with loss of wealth and life and crops. So give glad tidings of everlasting delight in Paradise to those who when affliction strikes them, say: Indeed to God do we belong, and indeed, to Him we are returning. Upon such as these descend prayers of blessing from their Lord and His Mercy” (Hammad 2014:39). It is intended to be recited both as a sign of patience as well as the acknowledgement that the followers will not be tested by God any more than what they can bear. 113 hope for the future generations of Pakistani American characters and fiction beyond the dilemmas of the newly arrived couple Zenab and Ali. According to the Pew Research Center, the Muslim American population is very dispersed and diverse, and it includes many recent immigrants from multiple countries around the world. The unwanted negative attention faced by Muslims in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the travel restrictions placed on Muslim American citizens and all Muslims in particular by the Trump administration have a serious impact on the identity of Muslim Americans. Diasporic individuals identifying with Islam as their religious identity are rising in Western societies. A myth surrounding Muslims and their religious practices is that they are incompatible with liberal democracies, which often leads to their marginalization and isolation from public and policy debates. Far from being the case, research has proven that Muslim minorities have adapted their laws, educational practices, and institutions around the majority culture’s norms. For pluralistic and diverse societies to function without conflict in the twenty-first century, a new type of political and social liberalism that is more accepting of Islam in the public sphere is needed (Jones 2020). In DIASC, when Zenab, a first-generation Pakistani American, has to prepare a feast on short notice for her visiting aunt, she is apprehensive about obtaining halal 50 meat at short notice. When she first arrived in the U.S., Zenab and her husband Ali always traveled from Connecticut to New York to buy halal meat. However, as time passes, she begins to buy meat from the supermarket, and at the time of washing the meat, she recites the Arabic words meant for consecrating the meat. However, her aunt’s visit prompts Zenab to be extra cautious about where she buys the meat, but she does not have enough time to go to New York. Her first point of reference is her Pickthall translation of the Quran, where she finds no contradiction in the translation of the verse 51 prescribing the concept of halal in the text. But her aunt may not accede to such an interpretation, for as Zenab remarks, “[w]e are all creatures of custom and habit” (DIASC 24). Zenab relies on the extended community’s wisdom and calls Kaneez, who has been in the U.S. longer than Zenab. Kaneez counsels her to buy kosher meat from Pathmark, a local supermarket selling kosher food. Kaneez elaborates that all Pakistani community members eat kosher meat because “their meat is prepared just like ours. They recite God’s name before slaughtering the animal and bleed the animal afterward” (DIASC 26). This is also confirmed by the entry on kosher 52 “in the column on the left. Right under Koran (DIASC 27)” in the Chamber’s Twentieth Century Dictionary that Zenab has carried with her from Pakistan. Zenab wants to be certain that this is all right, and she enquires if Wazira, another community member who, according to Zenab, has more authority in all matters of Islam in America, also consumes kosher. To this, Kaneez reassures her that, “Of course, Zenab, we all do it when there’s an emergency.” All? Ohh… “Especially in the winter. You see, it’s difficult to make frequent trips to the City when the weather’s so bad, you know. Thank God for the Jews.” (DIASC 26) 50 The Quranic term halal literally translates to “permissible” in contrast to “haram” which is translated as “forbidden”. The binary opposition of halal and haram is applied to various areas of religious practice. However, in the West, the term halal is usually found in the context of food, particularly meat. This refers to a specific way of slaughtering animals where the incision is made with a sharp knife by an adult Muslim, the animal is laid down facing the direction of Mecca and an Arabic prayer is recited at the time of the slaughter (Qasmi 2009). 51 The Cow: 2:168. Believers, eat of the wholesome things with which we have provided you… He has forbidden you carrion, blood, and the flesh of swine; also any flesh that is consecrated other than in the name of Allah (DIASC 24). 52 Pure, clean according to the Jewish ordinances – as of meat killed and prepared by Jews. [Hebrew, from yashar, to be right] (DIASC 27). 114 Religious or Islamic identity is an essential developmental aspect among Muslim diasporic individuals from South Asia. In simple terms, it can be explained by group membership to religious practices and tenets of Islam and its significance to the concept of “self.” It should not be confused with religiousness and religiosity, as not all Muslim Americans identify as practicing members. However, they still identify with Islam irrespective of their religious activity and participation in public and private spheres. It should also be differentiated from ethnic and cultural identities as not all South Asians are from the same ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. As discussed previously, Muslims from different South Asian countries do not speak the same language and have varying degrees of similarities even in the essential rituals and rites associated with Islam. Notwithstanding the differences, Islam has a significant influence on the worldview of modern Muslim Americans and forms a strong foundation in shaping their individual identity (A. Ahmed 2010). In DIASC, the character of Amjad Khan, a first-generation Pakistani American man in a mixed marriage, is representative of the balancing of Muslim and American identities in the South Asian American diaspora. While Amjad is perfectly fine with marrying a non-Muslim woman, he is not okay with his son dating girls in college without his consent or approval. They also have a daughter who they decided to call Marium. Amjad argues that the name is familiar and convenient plus it fits well with the U.S. mainstream culture when shortened to Mary. This is a happy compromise the family makes to remain true to their triple identity – Pakistani, American, and Islamic. In the true sense of the word “secular” in the South Asian context, the name is also trireligious as Amjad remarks “[t]hat doesn’t sound right, but if we can say bisexual, surely we can say tri-religious too. Why not? After all Islam, Christianity and Judaism all profess a claim to the same name” (DIASC 58). Twenty-first century writers like Ayad Akhtar and Haroon Moghul join Tahira Naqvi in the use of references to Jewish culture and traditions. Their objective is to find a precursor for a culturally familiar immigrant experience that Muslims can relate to in the U.S. The journey of the Jewish American community provides a precedent for forming a distinct American identity where religion and modernity go hand-in-hand. In this sense, the collection of interlinked stories in DIASC provides an essential understanding of an immigrant’s identity (re)formation process when religious identity is at the very core of their processes of “being” and “becoming.” The stories alternate between multiple homelands in the U.S. and Pakistan, just as the character of Zenab shifts between watching news segments on Middle East and Sesame Street on PBS. Her struggle to form a meaningful Pakistani Muslim American identity is evoked in her dream involving three generations of her family. In a dream, she saw that she and Sakina Phuphi 53 were walking about anxiously, lost in an Arab village, looking for a place to buy oregano. In the dream she led her aunt by her arm through a maze of dust-ridden streets white and torrid sunshine, encountering on her way her son who ran from her as if she were a stranger. (DIASC 27-28) Although they are not Arabs, the Islamic identity is highlighted by the fact that the dream is located in an Arab village instead of Lahore or Connecticut. The search for oregano, an Italian American spice used with spaghetti, alludes to her yearning to become American, as we also see in several other instances throughout the stories. The first-generation prefer their spaghetti like a pulao, but Zenab’s children, born and raised in the U.S., like their spaghetti the way it is made in America. And yet in another instance, on one of her annual visits to Lahore, Zenab realizes that it is impossible to renounce her Pakistani “self.” A part of her American “self” is left in her former 53 Phuphi is the Urdu word for paternal aunt. 115 homeland, and a part of her Pakistani “self” is carried forward to her new homeland. The metaphor of pomegranate 54 , though the fruit is found quite easily in the subcontinent, also has a Quranic significance in terms of both sustenance and artistry, hinting at the Islamic identity as the common thread between Zenab’s multiple homelands. Lahore is a marketplace, I think as the cool, tangy pomegranate juice travels down my throat. I’m constantly giving something of myself to it when I’m here, and I take something away each time. I’m never now what I was a minute ago. It changes me, makes me a stranger to myself. (DIASC 135) While trying to explain the meaning of hybridity to her youngest son Kasim, Zenab wonders herself, “if there’s an equivalent of ‘hybrid’ in Urdu, a whole word, not one or two strung together in a phrase to mean the same thing” (DIASC 59). The story in which this conversation takes place is titled “Brave We Are,” implying the complexity of a “hybrid” identity. While reflecting in her native language, Zenab unconsciously adds coriander and cumin to the meat, along with oregano to the spaghetti. At the same time, before making the spaghetti pulao for her husband and herself, she takes out some spaghetti for her children, for whom “[t]he strands must remain smooth, elusive, separate” (DIASC 60). Despite the growing importance of religion and its impact on identity formation, the developmental models of identity mainly focus on ethnicity and gender as the primary influencers to the processes of “being” and “becoming.” However, recent research (Arweck and Nesbitt 2010; McCullough et al. 2003; Peek 2005) has shown that religion is an essential contributing factor in constituting the “self.” Further, these intersectional studies have highlighted the distinct effect of gender, ethnicity, and intergenerational differences on the temporality of an individual’s religious identity. In the face of threats to their ethnic status, the religious identity comes to the foreground in Americans from non-European backgrounds (Lopez et al. 2011). In terms of gendered religious identities, women attribute more importance to religious rites and rituals than men (King and Boyatzis 2004). When it comes to intergenerational differences, firstand second-generation diasporic individuals have a stronger religious identity compared to third-generation diasporic individuals. This is explained by the fact that older generations use religious affiliation as a starting point to build community and often frequent places of worship to form emotional and social bonds (Harker 2001). However, in third-generation adolescents, there is generally more emphasis on religious identity rather than religiosity (Hirschman 2004). To move away from an identity purely based on Arab heritage and to address the diverse Muslim American perspectives on religion, “[t]he new diaspora discourse on pluralism displays a strong awareness of the need for a pluralistic interpretation of Qur’anic verses that have been utilized by extremists to justify their terrorist actions” (Haddad 2011:38). Muslim Americans must confront and answer many questions about their place in the U.S. and the role of Islam in modern America. Jesus and Muhammad need to coexist in churches turned into mosques. The context and importance of religion may have changed in the past fifty years, but in essence, the dilemmas of forging and maintaining a Muslim identity remain the same. As Haddad (2011) argues: 54 There is a hadith or saying from Prophet Muhammad indicating the importance of the fruit, suggesting that every pip is as important as the other – “There is no pomegranate unless there is a seed it in from Paradise and I would like not to miss a single seed in it” (Afroogh 2019:14). Pomegranate also holds great cultural, physical, and metaphorical significance in other ancient civilizations. For a detailed discussion see Stone (2017). 116 Who is a Muslim? When does one cease to be a Muslim? What is the relation of Islam to culture, to politics, to economic practices, and how does a Muslim maintain adherence to Islamically prescribed and proscribed admonitions that relate to these issues? Given the broad range of backgrounds and associations, what practices and beliefs are negotiable, fixed, or malleable? How does the cultural baggage carried by the immigrants influence their perception of Islamic culture as it takes root in America? Is there a possibility of reinterpreting Islamic jurisprudence to provide more options for behavior in the American context? Does the slogan “Islam is valid for all times and places” necessitate consensus on a particular prototype that has to be implemented wherever Islam is transplanted, or is there room for reinterpretation to help Muslims adjust to the new environment in which they find themselves? Can Muslims tolerate the different choices that members in the community make, or should they deem those who veer from the proclaimed laws beyond the pale? Can a Muslim live in a non-Muslim environment and continue to be considered a believer? These and other questions have been the focus of extensive discussion and debate during the twentieth century. (25-26) Returning to the discussion of hybridity in DIASC, as mentioned above, Zenab feels that she needs to demonstrate courageous endurance to explain the concept to her young child in a manner that will have a balanced effect on his “self.” She reflects, “Brave we are, we who answer questions that spill forth artlessly from the mouths of nine-year old purists, questions that can neither be waved nor dismissed with flippant ambiguity. Vigilant and alert, we must be ready with our answers” (DIASC 59). Zenab starts explaining the meaning of “hybrid” by referring to a mixture of orange juice with lemonade. When her son is not convinced, she tries to explain hybridity in terms of crossbreeding in the plant kingdom, giving the example of a hybrid apple created from a Macintosh and a Golden Yellow apple. Her curious son then asks about hybridity in animals, and the conversation eventually leads to hybridity in human beings. Although Zenab tries to dissuade her son Kasim from using the word in the context of people, Kasim quickly asks about his classmate Mary Khan, the daughter of their Pakistani American friend Amjad and his white English wife, Helen. Mary has blue eyes and black hair, so by Zenab’s analogy, Mary is hybrid. Kasim, of course abandons the topic soon, but Zenab reflects “with the absolute knowledge that ‘things’ are susceptible to misinterpretation” (DIASC 54) when she explains the meaning of “hybrid” as a “sort of mixture, a combination of different sorts of things” (DIASC 54). The role played by women in traditional Islamic societies is dependent on their age, relationships with others in the family, and status in the community. These attributions differ across ethnicities, and certain communities are more open to adapting the roles and responsibilities to the American context. Some American Muslim women “are actively engaged in the effort to identify which elements of Islam are essential, mandated by Qur’an and Sunnah (the way of life exemplified by the Prophet Muhammad), and which are culturally determined rather than religiously prescribed” (Haddad et al. 2006:16). In all stories from DIASC, we see the vital role of women, especially elderly women visiting from Pakistan, like Sakina Bano, Zenab’s paternal aunt, or Halima Khala, Zenab’s maternal aunt, as transmitters of cultural traditions and practices between their children’s homelands. The younger generation of women like Zenab and her friends Wazira and Kaneez interpret the Quran according to their American realities. In her copy of the Quran’s English translation, Zenab reads: “Women shall have rights similar to those exercised against men, although men have a status above women. Allah is mighty and wise” (DIASC 24). However, when her aunt laments that men have to do household chores in the U.S., Zenab objects to this and reminds her aunt of the gender roles in America. For many practicing Muslims, “the family is also the place where many of the rituals of daily life are carried out, including the celebration of naming ceremonies for children, coming-of-age rituals, the study of the Qur’an, and sharing stories from the life of the Prophet” (Haddad et al. 2006:82). The Muslim American family 117 is based on spatial proximity. “In some cases so many members of one family may have come to this country—often choosing to live as closely together as possible—that some semblance of extended family is possible” (Haddad et al. 2006:84). Furthermore, some “seek companionship to substitute for the loss of the natural extended family. In some cases, this reinforces feelings of identification with others who share the same national or cultural background and language but not the same religion” (Haddad et al. 2006:84). Additionally, some of them also “opt to find their ‘family’ in the local mosque or Islamic center, where they share overall Islamic values but may find themselves affiliated with ‘sisters and brothers’ whose cultural customs in relation to family and other issues differ” (Haddad et al. 2006:84-85). We see in DIASC, that one of the first things that Sakina Bano’s son does on her arrival in Danbury is to take her to the local Islamic center. Here men and women from different Islamic countries congregate for the Friday prayers. The community center acts as a mosque and a madrasah or religious school for teaching the children how to read Arabic so that they can recite the Quran. Sakina Bano is surprised at the diversity of the Muslim participants in the mosque, their physical appearances, the languages they speak, their different dressing styles ranging from the subcontinental shalwar kameez to the Arabian long robes. She is even more surprised at the Arabic pronunciation of the Egyptian imam, only to be informed that Arabic, not Urdu is his mother tongue. “When he began reciting from the Koran, how buoyantly the words of the ayaats fell from him, like unhurried rain from the heavens” (DIASC 11). The character of Sakina Bano represents the female matriarchal voice responsible for upholding religious rites and rituals and ensuring that they are passed on to the youth in foreign lands. Sakina Bano is also the spokesperson for the parents of first-generation diasporic individuals who are reluctant to travel to America, not because of the fear of the unknown or that they have to undertake a long journey alone, but because, in the words of the sixty-nine-year-old widow Sakina Bano: “I’m old, I want to take my last breath in my own country, and be buried among my own people. Tell me this, if I die there, what will happen to me?” (DIASC 1) Death in Islam is not seen as a permanent end of life, instead as a transition point to the hereafter. The worldly life is a test and an opportunity to perform good deeds in preparation for the afterlife. Human beings have only one chance to live their life in accordance with the religious tenets of Islam, and based on their good or bad deeds, they will be assigned a place in heaven or hell at the time of resurrection. Furthermore, death is a predetermined fact and part of the divine plan, though the exact time of death is only known to God (Leaman 2006). The last words of a Muslim are the Shahadah 55 , professing that there is only one God and that Muhammad is his prophet. The people surrounding the dying person encourage them to repeat these words or whisper them in their ears in preparation for the individual’s transition from the Alam al Mulk 56 to the Alam al Malakut 57 (C. Turner 2011). The Quran states, “[A]nd die not except in a state of Islam” (3.102), highlighting the importance of death as a Muslim believer to cross the realms. Throughout the journey, Sakina Bano is preoccupied with her uncertain or sudden death in the airplane. “What if the plane was forced to 55 The Shahada or the testimony is one of the five pillars of Islam and is also included in the Adhan or the call to each of the five compulsory prayers. It represents the acknowledgement of God’s indivisibility or oneness (tawhid) as well as the acceptance of Muhammad as the messenger of God. The recitation of the Shahada is required for a person to become a Muslim and is regarded as a common statement of faith across all Muslim communities. It is whispered by the father into the ear of a newborn child and is also whispered into the ear of a dying person (Cornell 2007). 56 In Islamic cosmology, Alam al Mulk refers to the realm of the physical or material world which can be perceived with all five senses (Cornell 2007). 57 In Islamic cosmology, Alam al Malakut refers to the realm of the imaginary or spiritual inhabited by metaphysical beings and where all ideas, thoughts, and actions are manifested (Cornell 2007). 118 make a landing in the country they were flying over when she took her last breath, and her body was abandoned there, in a strange country?” (DIASC 4) If that were to happen, she hopes that it would happen in or around Cairo. “[T]he thought that Egypt might be the place where she was left for burial provided some comfort, for at least she would be among fellow Muslims” (DIASC 4). Her fears are put to rest momentarily. She strikes a conversation with her co-passenger Abida and confesses once again “I only pray my maker allows me to die in my own country” (DIASC 6). Sakina Bano is shocked when Abida mentions that in America people in their seventies sometimes get married and start new lives. For Sakina Bano believes that this is the age when people should prepare for their afterlife and not form new attachments, which only lead to pain. Sakina Bano then asks about what happens if someone were to die in America and how their body could be brought back to Pakistan. Abida replies that it would be possible to send the dead body back to her homeland, albeit at the price of four plane tickets. Abida tries to solicitously console Sakina telling her that “nowadays there are burial rights in special cemeteries that have been allotted by Muslim communities” (DIASC 7). This, of course is no consolation to Sakina Bano, who cannot imagine being buried among strangers in a foreign country, nor does she want her children to be buried in America without their loved ones. At the local Salvation Army church turned mosque Sakina Bano’s heart convulses as she learns of the death of a community member who passed away on a Sunday. The stores were closed, so it was impossible to buy white cotton for the shroud, and they had to make a kaffan or the ritual shroud from white bed sheets donated by friends and family. The period after death holds great significance in Islam, and the term barzakh 58 denotes the timeframe between death and the day of resurrection and sometimes refers to the grave itself. Although there are multiple interpretations between the differences in the soul and the spirit and the two terms are used interchangeably, some Muslims believe that the nafs or the soul ceases with the human body at the time of death, but the ruh or the spirit refers to its immortal metaphorical essence after death (Smith and Haddad 1981). Therefore, funeral rites are significant in ensuring the soul’s safe passage to the hereafter. Muslims need to be buried as soon as possible, and cremation is strictly forbidden in Islam. The burial is preceded by the ritual bathing and shrouding of the body, followed by the funeral prayer, and finally the positioning of the deceased with their head facing in the direction of Mecca. All rituals are performed by the surviving male family members, including lowering the body into the grave. Quranic verses are recited at each stage of the rituals (Bilal 2005). What worries Sakina Bano is not the fact that she would be buried by a Turkish priest who would say her burial prayers nor that she was afraid of dying, but her greatest fear is meeting a fate as unfortunate as the recently deceased Pakistani woman in America without even the luxury of a proper shroud. Bedsheets! What an unfortunate woman. And what guarantee they were all cotton? Wash and wear is what they are making these days. And to be buried among strangers – such a dismal fate. Poor woman, to be so far from home and die. To be wrapped in bed sheets which said, on small tags somewhere, “Made in Amreeka.” Will the angels condescend to enter a grave where a body lay draped in a shroud made by Christians? Sakina Bano shuddered at the possibility of being abandoned by God’s messengers at the hour of reckoning. (DIASC 12) 58 In Islamic tradition, barzakh refers to the place that divides the living from the hereafter or a phase between death and resurrection (Cornell 2007). It is different from the Christian concept of purgatory but in fact barzakh is closer to the idea of limbo in Catholic theology denoting a place that is between life and afterlife. The Islamic concept of a’rāf designating the borderland between heaven and hell is closer to the concept of purgatory (Smith and Haddad 1981). 119 In conclusion, DIASC depicts stories of South Asian Muslim Americans who demonstrate a knowledge of how to juggle between their different “selves.” Zenab’s children “huddle together on the carpet in front of the television while Fred Flintstone and his prehistoric family, with their anachronistic lifestyle, yabadabadoo their way into their lethargic little heads” (DIASC 94). At the same time, both the children and their parents discuss the applicability of Quranic verses to their everyday life in a non-Islamic setting. The children are surprised to find simple words like “chagrin” in the Quran and are quick to realize that the “Koran is full of words like this, ordinary words. And ordinary everyday stories too” (DIASC 99). A. Ahmed and Donnan (1994) suggest that the challenge of comprehending and coming to terms with Islam “in an age of postmodernity will demand all our powers of analysis, old and new. Neither the Orientalism that Said so passionately denounced nor indeed the anti-Orientalism that Said himself has set in motion are of much help” (16). Faced with increasing globalization, the diversity in the Muslim diaspora, the global political response to Islam, the still pervasive negative image of Muslims in the media, and the trials and tribulations of reflexive modernity, we need to look for more nuanced ways of conceptualizing Muslim American identity. Baker (2015) contends that “Islam in the world is a living, rather than mechanical, entity. As a living organism, Islam has a remarkable capacity for self-organization, even in the absence of clear leadership or even a stable hierarchy” (287). With followers from diverse national backgrounds across the world, Baker (2015) further suggests that “Islam has the capacity to take on extraordinarily variable forms. Yet, for all the variety of its colors, it remains recognizably Islam” (287). Furthermore, Baker (2015) argues that within the confines of domestic authoritarianism or international sanctions, “the imprint of these diverse circumstances never eclipses the Islamic character of what emerges. Islam reacts to but remains apart from all such environments to preserve the essentials of its own distinctive identity” (287). For the native Arabic speakers, the authentic message of the Quran is only to be understood in Arabic, but for South Asian Muslims, translations have worked just fine. On symbolism, Naqvi remarks, “one man’s symbolism is another man’s nightmare” (DIASC 96). Even within the Muslim American context, there are diverse interpretations of the scripture. The true meaning of an Islamic identity can emerge in the late modern context while adhering to the principles of the Islamic concepts of tawhid 59 and taqwa 60 . DIASC is not the only literary narrative that portrays the importance of religion in matters of life and death for the diaspora. The first-generation narrative articulated by Naqvi is also found in all authors that form a part of this research project. Writers like A. Akhtar have narrated death 59 Tawhid, also spelled Tauhid, Arabic Tawḥīd, (“making one,” “asserting oneness”), in Islam, the oneness of God, in the sense that he is one and there is no god but he, as stated in the shahādah (“witness”) formula: “There is no god but God and Muhammad is His prophet.” Tawhid further refers to the nature of that God—that he is a unity, not composed, not made up of parts, but simple and uncompounded. The doctrine of the unity of God and the issues that it raises, such as the question of the relation between the essence and the attributes of God, reappear throughout most of Islamic history. In the terminology of Muslim mystics (Sufis), however, tawhid has a pantheistic sense; all essences are divine, and there is no absolute existence besides that of God. To most Muslim scholars, the science of tawhid is the systematic theology through which a better knowledge of God may be reached, but, to the Sufis, knowledge of God can be reached only through religious experience and direct vision (Encyclopaedia Britannica “Tawhid”). 60 Taqwa is defined as “[G]od-consciousness or God-fearing piety. Also rendered as “god-fearing,” “right conduct,” “virtue,” “wariness.” Taqwa and its derivatives appear more than 250 times in the Quran; Abu al-Ala Mawdudi (d. 1979) identified taqwa as the basic Islamic principle of God-consciousness, together with brotherhood, equality, fairness, and justice, on which the true Islamic society is established. Sayyid Qutb (d. 1966) systematically elaborated the significance of taqwa in his Quranic commentary, which is characterized by an emphasis on political activism. Fazlur Rahman (d. 1988) identified it as “perhaps the most important single concept in the Quran,” an inner vision that helps humans overcome their weaknesses (Oxford Dictionary of Islam “Taqwa”). 120 from an intergenerational perspective. In Homeland Elegies (2020), A. Akhtar shows the meaning of spatial belonging through the death of the narrator’s mother, who yearns for the ancestral homeland on her deathbed. The narrator’s father, a strong proponent of Trump and the American Dream, goes back to Pakistan at the end of his life. In American Dervish (2013), A. Akhtar provides a second-generation perspective through Hayat, who memorizes the Quran to secure a place for his parents in heaven after their death. The events leading to Mina’s death show the Sufi symbolism attached to the meaning of the afterlife in Islam. In How to Be a Muslim (2017), Haroon Moghul talks about the stigma attached to suicide in Islam, the importance of mental health in second-generation Muslim Americans, and access to therapists who can relate to Islamic values and customs to better assist their patients. Moghul stresses the importance of Muslim chaplains in American universities and the role of Islamic Student Centers to help provide religious guidance to Muslim Americans. Fatima Farheen Mirza shows how the second-generation diaspora internalizes religion in A Place for Us (2018). Mirza describes a devout Muslim father’s instinct to protect his children after the events of 9/11 by asking his daughters not to wear the hijab anymore. She reveals the parents’ lifelong efforts to pass on religious values to their children so that they can be together in the afterlife. Nafisa Haji depicts the repercussions of 9/11 on Muslim American identity in The Writing on My Forehead (2010) through her sister’s death in a hate crime. Poets such as Dilruba Ahmed and Aga Shahid Ali have eternalized the death of their loved ones through poems containing depictions of American realities and Muslim dilemmas in the face of dying in a foreign land. In Bright Lines (2015), Tanwi Nandini Islam places the death narratives in the ancestral homeland with descriptions of Islamic symbolism associated with rituals after death. Finally, S. M. Masood describes the horrors of warfare in the Middle East and the increasing Islamophobia in the U.S. in The Bad Muslim Discount (2020). S. M. Masood portrays the impact of death caused by religious strife on the identity of Muslim Americans and their extended families. The cemetery is depicted as a living space in all these narratives. The importance of dying as a Muslim and receiving the proper burial rites is a critical concern for the Muslim American diaspora. 121 2.5 Return of the Repressed in the Post-9/11 Era of Late Modernity for South Asian Muslim Americans in Dilruba Ahmed’s Bring Now the Angels Do you have a family history of grief? Please explain. Do tests confirm you are a carrier of grief? No, or Yes? * We apologize for the wait. Rest assured your grief is important to us. But if your grief is chronic, it cannot be addressed. Dilruba Ahmed, “Processing,” Bring Now the Angels Dilruba Ahmed is a second-generation Bangladeshi American poet, writer, and educator born in the U.S. who has grown up in western Pennsylvania and rural Ohio. In interviews with Karen Rigby (2011) and Justin Bigos (2012), D. Ahmed discusses her love for poetry and the primary motivation for her literary work. She has been influenced by both her formative years in a literature-loving home as well as her experience of living in midwestern American towns where she was the outsider. D. Ahmed was “othered” not only because she was a brown Muslim girl but also because her parents frequently moved in small rural towns with poor populations in the northeastern U.S. Influenced by American poets like Dickinson, Whitman, Frost, and Plath as well as Bangla poetry by Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das translated by her mother for her, D. Ahmed wrote her first poem at the age of ten. She has published two collections of award-winning poems, Dhaka Dust (2011) and Bring Now the Angels (2020) (BNTA). Her work has been anthologized in several well-known poetry collections. D. Ahmed writes about her tri-cultural roots in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Bangladesh in the backdrop of increasing Islamophobia in post9/11 America springing with a yearning to form a reflexive identity in late modernity characterized by globalization, digital transformation, and hybridity. D. Ahmed joins the rank of emerging second-generation South Asian Muslim American writers like A. Ahktar, Moghul, Mirza, and Islam in writing from a particular to the universal to portray the dilemmas of the “self” in late modernity. D. Ahmed’s writing style can be summarized in her own words in a dedication she wrote to the Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali 61 quoted in the interview by Karen Rigby (2011). Whether one’s particular Asian American identity plays prominently in one’s work is less important than whether one’s work strives to move us toward nuggets of truth. Because the truths of human experience are messy, complicated things that involve a necessary blurring of boundaries and divisions, the very divisions that enable us to pit one human against another. And for many Asian Americans, our lives are, by their very nature, both complex and contradictory. (D. Ahmed 2011 “Dilruba Ahmed: Interview”) 61 Agha Shahid Ali is an important literary figure responsible for the introduction of the English ghazal in American Literature. See K. Ali (2017) for a critical analysis of the poet’s work and life. With works such as Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English (2000) and Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals (2003), A.S. Ali maneuvers the performative style of the ghazal’s ancient poetic form to surface themes of cultural hybridity along with an intersubjective and an intersectional experience of writing and living in the U.S. The theme of exile in his poetry not only evokes cultural and political loss but also displaces the idea of nationhood using the poetic literary form to subvert identity (Parveen 2014). For a more detailed discussion on the poet see Chapter 3.3 in the dissertation below. 128 Peace TV. This creates a hybrid culture that merges consumerist hedonism with a globalized version of Islam. The virtual spheres provide access to a Friday sermon anywhere in the world, blurring the lines between local and global Islam, which has influenced the interpretation of religion among the youth. The binaries of progress and regression in the Middle East have spilled over to the West, shaping a new ambiguous form of late modernity (T.R. Khan 2015). “New forms of social movement mark an attempt at a collective reappropriation of institutionally repressed areas of life” (Giddens 1991:207). D. Ahmed’s poem Google Search Autocomplete represents the intersection between personal spirituality and the pervasive world of technology. It is an artistic expression of the perceptions held by a diverse population and how these thoughts subsequently take the form of a search on the world wide web. The title itself is loaded with multiple connotations about the twenty-first century: “Google” denotes the capitalistic and neoliberal domination of contemporary society, “Search” signifies the literal and figurative quest for finding one’s place in the late modern world, and “Autocomplete” alludes to the influence of the power of the collective dominant discourse on personal knowledge. The poem has multiple perspectives asserting the presence of religious, spiritual, economic, emotional, and philosophical layers in the diaspora’s process of “being” and “becoming.” On the one hand, we have, God who sees who wasn’t there who created hearts to love who strengthens me God who is rich is mercy who saves (BNTA 26) And on the other hand, we have, God of carnage God bless america God bless america movie God gave me you God gave me you lyrics (BNTA 26) Moghissi (2006) argues that in the case of Muslim diasporic communities, the collective identity is formed more as a reaction to repeated discrimination by members of the dominant culture rather than a result of nostalgia for the heritage culture and homeland. Being branded as Arab or Muslim irrespective of whether they are practicing members or the degree to which Islam influences their identity is a process that has resulted in radicalized cultural identities among Muslims in the West. D. Ahmed’s poem Interrogation talks about a ubiquitous scene at airport security screenings where Muslim passengers are isolated from others either based on their name or their travel history in the passport as well as on the nature of their visit to the U.S. Depending on the airport where they land, the interrogation may last from several hours to a couple of days. The interrogating officer needs to ascertain the passenger’s past, present, and future actions and run an extensive and intrusive background check before the passenger is let into the country. The interrogation applies to those on temporary visas and those who hold U.S. passports. In Interrogation, the “suspect” citizen is questioned about their loyalty to the U.S., and at the same time, they need to assure the immigration officer about their denouncement of fundamentalism in Islam. [Document text truncated for crawler view.]