Reinventing Identities in Sheila Abdullah’s Saffron Dreams

Abstract

This paper explores South Asian American women’s diasporic identities with a specific focus on Sheila Abdullah’s Saffron Dreams (2009). The paper studies Pakistani American women’s struggle for identity in the aftermath of 9/11 to argue that Abdullah establishes a unique identity for her protagonist that defies homogeneous identity categories of both native and host cultures. Drawing on Burke and Stets’s (2009) notion of the process of identity formation both as an individual and as part of an ethnic group, the study analyzes the selected text’s reinvention of identities for its heterogeneous protagonist at a cross-cultural level. The paper presents a diverse reading of the representation of contemporary South Asian American women by emphasizing Abdullah’s narrative approach and the ways in which it complicates conventional understandings of immigrant experiences.