Bangladeshi Novels in English: Cultural Contact and Migrant Subjectivity

It challenges stereotypes surrounding Bangladeshi migration through seminal 20th and 21st-century Bangladeshi novels in English. It focuses on the complexities of migratory experiences through various gender and age groups while setting the study within the English-language literary history and linguistic ethnography of Bangladesh Bangladeshi Novels in English: Cultural Contact and Migrant Subjectivity is the first comprehensive study of Bangladeshi migration and diasporas through eight seminal Bangladeshi novels in English from the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Adib Khan’s Seasonal Adjustments and Spiral Road, Farhana H. Rahman’s The Eye of the Heart, Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, Manzu Islam’s Burrow, Nashid Kamal’s The Glass Bangles, Zia H. Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know, and Tahmima Anam’s The Bones of Grace. The book situates the study within the English-language literary history and linguistic ethnography of Bangladesh while unveiling the complexities of Bangladeshi Muslim migration from men, women, and children’s perspectives. It challenges the stereotyping of Bengali Muslim migrants as a failure of immigration and multiculturalism and offers a fresh view on cultural contact and the formation of migrant subjectivity at the intersections of gender, race, religion, class, culture, ethnicity, history, politics, and personality.