Exploring Alternativism: South Asian Muslim Women's English Fiction

Abstract

South Asian Muslim women writers of English fiction enlist alternativism to underline the pluralism that constitutes a Third World woman's experience. This essay focuses on this genre as a site of struggle enveloping various socio-political dimensions that have imposed stereotypical universal images on a South Asian Muslim woman. This research explores whether these women are able to rise above the debilitating generalizations imposed on them by the local religious and political structures and the Western Feminist discourse. It also attempts to answer whether these writings present a discourse different from the normative discursive mechanisms that characterize women as “objects.”