Bureaucratic Belonging: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Literary Creation of the South Asian American Subject

Because of an emphasis on a transnational approach to reading South Asian literature produced in English, the "American" in South Asian American literature has been inadequately theorized. The history of South Asian immigration in the United States, encompassing immigration restrictions and permissions, naturalization challenges, bureaucratically constructed racial ambiguity, and national security measures, illuminates the reading of South Asian American literature by privileging consideration of these works' American context while still honoring transnational perspectives.;This dissertation understands the persistence of South Asia in the literary imagination not as nostalgia, nor as resistance to assimilation, but rather as an ongoing part of the South Asian experience in the United States. The present is built on a South Asian past that cannot be suppressed by immigration precisely because this past is linked to the bureaucratic process of immigration and citizenship. This understanding of immigrant subjectivity does not hinge on interpersonal relations, but on an inherently unequal relationship, a bureaucratic one. Thus, bureaucratic status (illegal/legal; citizen/noncitizen; technically skilled/unskilled) joins generation (first/second) as categories of analysis in this dissertation.;Chapter 1, examining novels by Bharati Mukherjee and Kiran Desai, argues that illegal immigrants consolidate their national belonging through the perpetration of violence. Chapter 2's discussion of works by Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Mohsin Hamid argues that U.S. national identity is complicated by its reliance on technological achievement that requires the expertise of immigrants. Chapter 3, analyzing work by Reetika Vazirani and Imad Rahman, shows the most established South Asian Americans, U.S. citizens, nonetheless registering a sense of precarious belonging through their incessant concerns about surveillance, demonstrating the disconnect between official and experiential forms of belonging.;Because, as Patricia Chu notes, culture "is a site for imaginatively transforming readers and protagonists into national subjects," this dissertation asserts the continued importance of a national perspective in the study of South Asian American literature as one kind of strategic challenge to marginalization. To resist an overemphasis on the transnational is to acknowledge that it is not only the state that has the power to suspend immigrant subjectivity between foreign and non-foreign, but also modes of literary study.