Dialogues in the Diaspora: Muslim Bangladeshi American Women’s Responses to South Asian Diaspora Literature

• In Event: Exploring South Asian Experiences in North America: Negotiating Multiple Identities Across Educational Spaces

Abstract

This study explores how Muslim Bangladeshi-American women (MBAW), specifically daughters of the Bangladesh Liberation War, respond to popularized South Asian diaspora literature (SADL). In 1971, Bangladesh and Pakistan waged a war against one another, resulting in up to three million deaths, ten million displaced, and an undocumented diaspora to the U.S. (Rezwan, n.d). Many of these immigrants arrived through ‘preference category’ statutes added to the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, as professional contributors to American society, and settled in predominately Caucasian neighborhoods (Bhatia, 2007). The second-generation children of these immigrants struggled with their bicultural identity. Young girls, specifically, dealt with binary constructs associated with gender, religious and cultural norms (Purkayastha, 2005). Some second-generation children began to write these ideas in fiction and non-fiction forms for publication. Subsequently in the 1990s, SADL entered the U.S. mainstream with several texts awarded prestigious recognition, such as the Pulitzer Prize and Booker Prize.

This study explores how the rise of SADL may serve as an educative and reflective vehicle for MBAW to negotiate understandings about their biculturalism. This research inquiry enters through a postcolonial feminist framework to analyze the ways MBAW create a hybrid identity (Bhabha 1994) to resist the Orientalist (Said 1994) dichotomies between East and West and tradition and modernity. This qualitative study draws out specific themes through a case study methodology. The purposefully selected sample is composed of five women, from similar communities, who participated in one individual interview each and one focus group. The data were coded and organized according to the research questions and the analysis and interpretation of findings were organized by way of three analytic categories based on the study’s conceptual framework: (a) responses and experiences with bicultural identity (b) identification with literature that they read in their high school English classrooms (c) perceptions of current SADL and its use in high school classrooms. This deliberate methodology, incorporating individual storytelling and collaborative dialogue (Minh-ha 1989), fosters not only an important mode of qualitative inquiry, but encourages the role of female coalitions (Mohanty 2003) and book groups in South Asian communities, and more broadly Culturally Relevant Pedagogy (CRP) (Ladson-Billings 1997) through the integration of diaspora literature.

My research revealed that all women in the study struggled with their bicultural identity at various points throughout their high school experience and beyond. All participants responded that they had not read any SADL until they were in college or older, but when they did, they identified greatly with it. Their perceptions of the current SADL is that it could offer high school students perspectives into South Asian individuals’ cultures and lives, and could therefore oppose stereotypes of South Asian people in the media. The participants also responded that SADL could offer support to high school students currently struggling with their bicultural identity. With the present global and political climate towards Islam, and the revival of Orientalist depictions of nationhood, it is critical to reflect on the need and use of diaspora literature in the classroom and beyond (Gottschalk & Greenberg, 2008).

Author

• Uzma Akhand Hossain, Teachers College, Columbia University