Identity Crisis of the South Asians In America

The book discusses identity crisis in two recent novels which are, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. It mainly presents a detailed analysis of the identity crisis that South Asian immigrants in America suffer. The book, in its first part, tries to defy the common belief that all Muslims are terrorists through drawing a cutting edge between Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in the name of Islam. In the discussion of this part, the book scrutinizes Manuel Castell’s theory of “identity –building” and some of Edward Said’s concepts in his book Orientalism, to show that Muslim immigrants in America are suffering religious identity crisis. In the second section of the book, the discussion exhibits the cultural identity crisis the Indian immigrants suffer as a result of the cultural dispute between the first and the second generation of the immigrants. In this part, the analysis employs Homi Bhabha’s concept, “The Third Space” and Stuart Hall’s “diaspora” to show that the second generation suffers cultural trauma.