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

Abstract

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.