Engaging Ethnicities: Home, Identity, and Belonging in the Works of Meena Alexander
摘要
This chapter is a discussion of three major works by Meena Alexander. Assessing Alexander’s experiences as a South Asian American feminist writer operating in the diaspora, it interrogates the ways in which Alexander’s subjectivity as a diasporic writer is constructed through her entanglement with many languages and her identification with multiple anchorages. This chapter is introduced with a theoretical mapping of the field of ethnicity studies and links it up with the politics of identity and politics of location. It is followed by an interrogation of the ways in which female South Asian diasporic subjectivity in Alexander’s work operates at the intersections of both gender and race, and how this racialized, ethnic, female diasporic subject becomes marked as an “Other.” Alexander’s work continues to signal the changing times and geopolitical shifts that have led to an intensification of violence, rage, and unwelcome sexual interest towards the brown-skinned Arab/Asian post 9/11. This chapter ends with the accounting of how in Alexander’s works, belonging is possible not in any specific physical place or in the security of familial affiliations; but, through the promise of a transnational female community of migrants whose lives have been fractured by the experiences of displacement and who are bound together by their search for a home.