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Srikanth looks at why S. Asians are interested in the American experience | BOSTON — When Professor Rajini Srikanth characterizes her latest book, "The World Next Door: South Asian American Literature and the Idea of America," it sounds as if literature is writing the world into existence.
A professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Srikanth was born in India and completed her doctorate in English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is co-editor of the anthology "Contours of the Heart: South Asians Map North America" and of the collection of essays "A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America."
Extending the work from her co-edited collections, her latest book places the work of literature in a broader frame that accommodates the everyday experiences of South Asians living in an increasingly interconnected world.
Placed alongside other ethnic groups, South Asians seem to be particularly concerned about what it means to live and write about America.
The concern isn't a recent one, according to Srikanth. It emerges from a long-standing historical reality of wanting to belong to more than one place at the same time.
"Within our own histories, whether it's 19th or 20th century histories, it's impossible to escape this dual sense of location, sometime multiple. If we're talking about South Asians from Africa, even if they were born and raised in East Africa, [they] certainly carry with them ancestral memories with them of South Asia [where] their great-grandfathers came from or grandfathers came from."
"In our own histories, there's no way we can avoid this question of diaspora. So it's not a question limited to the African experience or the Jewish experience. It's very much a part of the Asian American experience and extends across several Asian American ethnicities: Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese."
Srikanth acknowledges that belonging in America isn't altogether a simple question. Formally trained in American Studies, she cannot help but write about the possibilities and contradictions in the making of American identity from its beginnings. Speaking about the untidy marriage between the crafting of the Declaration of Independence and the extermination of Native Americans, Srikanth notes that "[at] one level, the articulation that one man and one woman can achieve his or her potential is very American."
"But even while the American ideal was being crafted, there were shadows that we chose to ignore," she says. "There's an in-built tension at the outset. The ideal gets tested periodically. Because the United States believes very much in its innocence as a nation, it keeps presenting itself as having the most enviable nation."
Srikanth finds that the writers that most challenge her constantly investigate their place within nations.
According to Srikanth, a writer like Amitav Ghosh who is not strictly Asian American but is concerned with the idea of belonging and sometimes not belonging to a nation, provides a valuable vision for living in today's world.
In his novels "In An Antique Land" and "The Glass Palace," Ghosh sees the distinction between identity politics and global politics in a much larger context of how one can be a global citizen.
Srikanth is hopeful that the concern for belonging in a globalized world, central to South Asians and South Asian writers, can be understood in the act of reading itself.
The kind of reader that she envisions for her book is at once "seduced by a beautiful paragraph or phrasing, but does not persist in that state. [The reader] says then, why was I seduced by this? What about the seduction blinded me to something? What is underlying this writer's move to make me focus on a particular idea. Is it because the writer wishes that I not notice the absence of something? A reader can take pleasure in something but not allow that pleasure to be the end of the reading."
The wide-ranging topics covered in her book sometimes get Srikanth concerned about her own place in the world.
"Sometimes I wonder about myself. Do I really belong in an English department? On the other hand, English departments are increasingly beginning to realize that perhaps the most responsible way of teaching literature is to teach it with attention to all these other forces that shape the literary work. I would say that my writing reflects that desire. To gesture to a universe of ideas outside the text," she says.
Her next project extends her interest in identity and politics by looking at the relationship between empathy and power in literature.
"I'm looking at expressions of empathy as they occur in literature. Empathy by groups or individuals in power towards groups or individuals over whom they have this power. I begin actually with William Faulkner. I'm interested in historical moments: the Japanese-American internment experience and also the current moment of detention of detainees. How does it emerge? What are the motivations that prompt its emergence? How might we understand its impact upon the lives that we lead?" she says.
If these literary concerns seem to bear on today's lived realities of nations and governments, it is because Srikanth finds reading literature inseparable from understanding the world.
"For me, I can never divorce my examination of literature from the political context in which I find myself," she says. | 
