Love in a White World: Moving Beyond Clichés in Popular South Asian-American Literature and Film

Dharmini R Patel, Purdue University

Abstract

My dissertation focuses on discourses of romantic love and the institution of marriage as represented in literary, cinematic, and cultural discourses of and about the contemporary South Asian diaspora in the United States. I argue that by focusing on the question of “love marriage” and “arranged marriage”—a recurring theme in both fiction and film by South Asian-Americans—the writers invoke key issues surrounding women’s sense of self, autonomy, and role within the immigrant community. They attend to the cultural anxiety that emerges within the immigrant community as women are charged with the preservation of an “essentialized,” gendered South Asian identity. Too often popular discourse sets up a restrictive, binary model where the woman either follows tradition and has an arranged marriage, or is modern and chooses love outside the immigrant community. My research shows South Asian writers complicating this binary and the belief that South Asian and South Asian-American women must either assimilate to American cultural norms or follow oppressive South Asian traditional cultures in order to preserve cultural continuity. Rather, they show that while love has been constructed as a necessary precondition of marriage in a Western context, it is also influenced by racial, class, and heteronormative boundaries much as arranged marriages have been in a South Asian immigrant context. By examining representations of cultural dislocation and emotional alienation, as explored in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine and Wife, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala, and Nisha Ganatra’s Chutney Popcorn, and the contentious political, social, and religious battles surrounding marriage in the United States and elsewhere, I argue that a study of love and marriage effectively challenges the strictures of normativity, not only in the South Asian-American community, but also within U.S. mainstream culture.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Sagar, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Womens studies|British and Irish literature

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