Book contents
- The Cambridge History ofAsian American Literature
- The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Early Forms of Expression to the Start of the Twentieth Century
- Part II The Exclusion Era, World War II, and the Immediate Postwar Era
- Part III The Asian American Movement
- Part IV Canons
- Part V Post-1965 and the Twenty-First Century
- Part VI Twenty-First Century: 9/11, Empire, and Other Challenges to Literature
- 29 The 9/11 of Our Imaginations: Islam, the Figure of the Muslim, and the Failed Liberalism of the Racial Present
- 30 Narrating War: Arab and Muslim American Aesthetics
- 31 Thick Time and Space: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Aesthetics
- 32 Asian American New Media as Literature for the Digital Age
- 33 Beyond National Literatures: Empire and Amitav Ghosh
- Bibliography
- Index
33 - Beyond National Literatures: Empire and Amitav Ghosh
from Part VI - Twenty-First Century: 9/11, Empire, and Other Challenges to Literature
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2015
By
Book contents
- The Cambridge History ofAsian American Literature
- The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Early Forms of Expression to the Start of the Twentieth Century
- Part II The Exclusion Era, World War II, and the Immediate Postwar Era
- Part III The Asian American Movement
- Part IV Canons
- Part V Post-1965 and the Twenty-First Century
- Part VI Twenty-First Century: 9/11, Empire, and Other Challenges to Literature
- 29 The 9/11 of Our Imaginations: Islam, the Figure of the Muslim, and the Failed Liberalism of the Racial Present
- 30 Narrating War: Arab and Muslim American Aesthetics
- 31 Thick Time and Space: Karen Tei Yamashita’s Aesthetics
- 32 Asian American New Media as Literature for the Digital Age
- 33 Beyond National Literatures: Empire and Amitav Ghosh
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter focuses on Amitav Ghosh's relationship to the United States and its role in the Anglophone Empire. It explores Ghosh's problematic relationship with the United States, asking how his hemispheric writing continues to extend and even alter the terrain often associated with Asian American literature. In terms of the Bengali American grain, Ghosh's writing sits both within and outside the Asian American literature. Gosh work is much less invested in the United States and the realities of Indian American experience in the United States than the writing of Mukherjee, Lahiri, or Divakaruni. Ghosh's treatment of West Bengal is more historicized and ecocritical and more comfortable with contemporary Bengali realities than the writing. The need to believe in a wider Indianness is driven both by the horrors of religiously motivated civil violence in India and by a more utopian desire to get past ethnic, caste, and societal divisions.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature , pp. 567 - 582Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015