Gendered constructions of a multicultural identity in South Asian-Canadian short-story writing

Abstract

Multiculturalism, viewed as a positive influence in the intercultural dialogue between opposite discourses, has created specific categories of writing, according to class, gender or race issues. The diverse focalizations applied in the gaze of the other transcend monologic analyses and enrich square-minded ideologies. Thus, taking into account the intersections of power-approach and subalternity, this paper tries to discover the new Englishness brought by some women writers with South-Asian origins living in Canada or the U.S. (that is, the first world) under a threefolded perspective: the first world-third world confrontation, the Saidian orientalist domination and the gendered imbalance. Authors like Surjeet Kalsey, Himani Bannerji, Lakshmi Gill, will also be compared with other Indo-Canadian and Indo-American writers (Barati Mukherjee, Uma Parameswaran, Suniti Namjoshi...) to guess if the Indo-Canadian gaze has something to do with the other hyphenated, and presumably similar, literary constructions of transculturalism. Books like Her Mother’s Ashes. Stories by South Asian Women in Canada and the United States (1994), and Her Mother’s Ashes 2. More Stories by South Asian Women in Canada and the United States (1998) will be analyzed under the perspective of finding similarities and divergences on the construction of a feminine identity derived from the plurality of their origins and of their vital experience on migration, dislocation and exile.