| ID | 120710 |
| Title Proper | White and Indian? intermarriage and narrative authority in South Asian American fiction |
| Language | ENG |
| Author | Black, Shameem |
| Publication | 2013. |
| Summary / Abstract (Note) | How does intermarriage affect a storyteller? In this essay, I seek to examine literary narratives of South Asian family formation that take late twentieth-century intermarriages-particularly between Indian men and white American women-as their central governing trope. This phenomenon raises two linked questions: first, how do South Asian families recruit or reject individuals within constructs of South Asian identity; and second, to what extent do individuals not of South Asian descent gain the authority to imagine and re-imagine the contours of their multiracial family? I here examine the work of the white American writer Robbie Clipper Sethi, whose novel-in-stories, The Bride Wore Red (1996), tells the unfolding saga of a multiracial South Asian family in the United States and India. These narratives of white women socialised into ambivalent places within larger South Asian families, I argue, figure larger anxieties about imaginative representation across the mobile borders of what is considered one's culture. The family structure emerges as a contradictory space that empowers this border-crossing representational authority by simultaneously calling this authority into question. |
| `In' analytical Note | South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies Vol. 36, No.1; Mar 2013: p.134-148 |
| Journal Source | South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies Vol. 36, No.1; Mar 2013: p.134-148 |
| Key Words | Multiracial ; South Asian Diaspora ; Robbie Clipper Sethi ; Short Story ; Family |