Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-72crv Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-08T03:58:14.840Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Minority Cosmopolitanism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Susan Koshy
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The topography of literary production and consumption has been transformed as writers and texts travel, ethnic literature is taught and translated in multiple national venues, and writers’ locations, audiences, and subject matter resist ready alignment. he growing internationalization of ethnic literary production has produced a heterogeneous range of texts, which challenge the established boundaries of ethnic and world literature. Because they focus on minorities, these texts have been slow to win recognition as world literature even though they depict transnational movements and identifications that diverge from those in canonical ethnic narratives. I develop the analytic of minority cosmopolitanism to examine the ways in which these literary narratives of worlding contest contemporary economic and political processes of globalization and Eurocentric accounts of globality. This essay considers how the gendered figure of the diasporic citizen serves as a vehicle for minority cosmopolitanism in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (1999).

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 126 , Issue 3 , May 2011 , pp. 592 - 609
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Works Cited

Anderson, Amanda. “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity.” Cheah and Robbins 265–89.Google Scholar
Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1962. Print.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.Google Scholar
Birkerts, Sven. “In Our House There Were No Chinese Things”. New York Times Book Review 19 Dec. 1993: 17. Print.Google Scholar
Carbado, Devon W. “Racial Naturalization”. American Quarterly 57.3 (2005): 633–58. Print.Google Scholar
Cheah, Pheng, and Robbins, Bruce, eds. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. Print.Google Scholar
Cliford, James. “Diasporas”. Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 302–38. Print.Google Scholar
Constable, Nicole. Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997. Print.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques. “Hostipitality.” Trans. Barry Stocker and Forbes Morlock. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5.3 (2000): 3–18. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Hochschild, Arlie. Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy. New York: Metropolitan, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
“Exorbitant.” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford UP, n.d. Web. 20 June 2010.Google Scholar
Ghosh, Amitav. “The Diaspora in Indian Culture”. Public Culture 2.1 (1989): 73–78. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ghosh, Amitav. The Shadow Lines. New York: Penguin, 1989. Print.Google Scholar
Hagedorn, Jessica. Introduction. Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction. New York: Penguin, 1993. xxi–xxx. Print.Google Scholar
Hagedorn, Jessica. Introduction. Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World. New York: Penguin, 2004. xxvii–xxxii. Print.Google Scholar
Hagedorn, Jessica. Letter. New York Times Book Review 23 Jan. 1994: 27. Print.Google Scholar
Held, David. Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Cosmopolitan Governance. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Koshy, Susan. Introduction. Transnational South Asians: The Making of a Neo-Diaspora. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 2008. 1–41. Print.Google Scholar
Koshy, Susan. Sexual Naturalization: Asian Americans and Miscegenation. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies. Boston: Houghton, 1999. Print.Google Scholar
Lahiri, Jhumpa. Unaccustomed Earth. New York: Knopf, 2008. Print.Google Scholar
Lan, Pei-Chia. Global Cinderellas: Migrant Domestics and Newly Rich Employers in Taiwan. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life. vol. 2. Trans. John Moore. London: Verso, 2002. Print.Google Scholar
Mishra, Vijay. “The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora”. Textual Practice 10.3 (1996): 421–47. Print.Google Scholar
Neruda, Pablo. Residence on Earth. Trans. Walsh, Donald D. New York: New Directions, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Ngai, Mae. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, Martha C., et al. For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism. Ed. Cohen, Joshua. Boston: Beacon, 1996. Print.Google Scholar
Palumbo-Liu, David, ed. The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. Print.Google Scholar
Pollock, Sheldon. “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History”. Public Culture 12.3 (2000): 591–625. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. Print.Google Scholar
Robbins, Bruce. Introduction to part 1. Cheah and Robbins 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schillinger, Liesl. “American Children.” New York Times. New York Times, 6 Apr. 2008. Web. 8 June 2009.Google Scholar
Smith, Neil. “Scale Bending and the Fate of the National.” Scale and Geographic Inquiry. Ed. Sheppard, Eric and McMaster, Robert B. Malden: Blackwell, 2004. 192–212. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Print.Google Scholar
Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writings, 1930–1990. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar