N Yousaf

The local and the global: Gina Nahai and the taking up of serpents and stereotypes

Region, home and transnational migration are explored in terms of the transcultural complexities that reverberate through Iranian American Gina Nahais Sundays Silence. Nahai grapples with stereotypes that attach to the Holiness churches in the east Tennessee region of Appalachia. This essay argues that the novels politics rest on the intersubjectivity of strangers as bound into a metaphysics of desire. It is through this paradigm that Nahai writes against the reductive association of “minority” literature with discrete “national” models and through which she explores the local and the regional in a culturally complex narrative about the crisis of alterity.

New Immigrants and the Southern Gothic

Nahem Yousaf’s chapter analyses how immigrant writers and characters disturb, extend and change the Southern Gothic in a poetics of relation that conserves some of the most potent images but fuses them with gothic elements grounded in other places. He argues that the most effective and intriguing of writers imagine more than a geographical extension of supposedly ‘Southern’ exceptionalism, whether of place or image; they intervene in the tropes themselves, in the cultural parochialism of the term ‘Southern Gothic’, and in the idea of distinctively Southern literature. Through close readings of novels and stories by Flannery O’Connor, Gina Nahai, T.C. Boyle, Augusta Trobaugh, Susan Choi and Steven Sherrill, Yousaf explores what gothic preoccupations mean in transnational fictions located at the shifting and ambiguous edges of ‘Southern’ fiction.