Deshe/Bideshe: Bangladeshi American Lived Experiences in Tanwi Nandini Islam’s Bright Lines

Dr. Asif Iqbal is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Oberlin College, Ohio. His area of research is focused on the Global Anglophone novel, cultural studies and the Global South, postcolonial, and diasporic literatures. His work has been published in South Asian Review and Transcultural Humanities in South Asia: Critical Essays on Literature and Culture. His current book project Two Partitions 1947 & 1971: Cultural Imaginings of Postcolonial Bangladesh, a comparative and interdisciplinary study of literatures, traces the formation of Bangladesh through the South Asian partitions of 1947 and 1971.

In this presentation, Dr. Iqbal will discuss Islam’s novel Bright Lines, exploring how tradition, modernity, immodesty, and the imperatives of domesticity confront one another throughout the novel. He will shed some light on what it means to live an American life as a Bangladeshi and the novel’s engagement with the experience of living between home and a landscape that in many ways is foreign to the characters of the novel.