Aftermath 9/11: Asian-American Belonging Revised in works by Mohsin Hamid and Jhumpa Lahiri

The paper examines narratives by Jhumpa Lahiri (the author of Unaccustomed Earth) and Mohsin Hamid (the author of Reluctant Fundamentalist) as exemplary accounts of identity quests of Asian migrants to the US who tend to negotiate their bicultural identity, and to re-configure their private spaces as responsive either to the cultural roles, or the global events such as 9/11. It shows as insufficient to examine these global authors as the mere third world cosmopolitan lot (M. Mukherjee), or to frame texts as comparison literature --products of the global literary market imagination (R. Walkowitz). In the overlaps of Western or Eastern cultures, these transnational negotiations examine meanings of acculturation for a model minority professional and mother (in Lahiri) or cast away Muslim (in Hamid). Choosing not to ignore intimacies of identity issues over the wider issues of dislocations and displacement in the US context, the article promotes selected comparative tools (as provided by S. Hall, L. Lowe, F. Wu) to spell out the challenge for transnational scholarship, and urges to examine the large emerging body of transcultural South Asian fiction with its diversified narrations that re-imagine topics within the current stream of the world literature identity politics.