Memoirs of Dalit South Asian American Women Writers: Migration, Race, and Caste

Abstract

This paper will examine how caste manifests in the South Asian America diaspora through an examination of Thenmozhi Soundararajan’s The Trauma of Caste and Yashica Dutt’s Coming Out as Dalit. Both these works are memoirs or first person narratives and thereby engage in a genre common to Dalit writing—atmakatha or lifestories that function to expose violence and systemic discrimination while also bearing witness to those injustices and arguing for social change. The memoir as a form also has gained popularity in the United States as a feminist form that voices experiences of trauma and marginalization due to race, gender, or sexuality. At the intersection of these literary traditions, Soundararajan and Dutt explore what Suraj Yengde has called “global caste”—the migration of caste identities and systems of discrimination transnationally. My paperexplores global caste in the context of racialization of South Asians in the United States and as presented in a Dalit feminist lifewriting context.