Identity and the Literary Imagination: Shifting Borders, Emerging Voices in Global South Asia presents a rigorous and wide-ranging examination of the contested processes through which identities are imagined, negotiated, and transformed within contemporary South Asian literary and cultural production. Positioned at the intersection of postcolonial studies, diaspora studies, gender and sexuality studies, memory studies, and critical regional scholarship, this first volume of a two-volume project investigates the literary articulation of belonging, displacement, subjectivity, and resistance across diverse historical, political, and cultural contexts.

Structured around four interconnected thematic sections, the volume examines diasporic identities, borderland subjectivities, gendered and queer selfhoods, and narratives of resistance emerging from marginalized communities and regions. The contributors explore the complexities of home, exile, migration, and affiliation through analyses of Indian, Tibetan, Muslim, Dalit, queer, and diasporic experiences. The chapters also address the ethical and political dimensions of Partition, transnational mobility, cultural hybridity, collective memory, and historical trauma. They study how literary texts engage with enduring questions of identity and social justice.

Through analyses of works by Jhumpa Lahiri, Imtiaz Dharker, Geetanjali Shree, V. S. Naipaul, Shashi Tharoor, Arundhati Roy, Girish Karnad, and numerous contemporary South Asian writers, the volume demonstrates how literary representation contests dominant narratives and opens new possibilities for cultural and political imagination. Particular attention is devoted to precarity, counter-memory, disability, surveillance, ecological crisis, linguistic plurality, and subaltern agency. These perspectives reveal the diverse strategies through which individuals and communities confront structures of exclusion and negotiate relations of power.

The volume thus presents South Asia as a dynamic field of identities, affiliations, and political contestation. It makes a substantial contribution to contemporary debates in South Asian literary studies and related fields. The book offers an indispensable resource for scholars, researchers, and students who seek a deeper understanding of identity and the transformative potential of literary representation in an increasingly interconnected world

Moussa Pourya Asl is an Assistant Professor at Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University, Tabriz, Iran. He previously served as an Affiliate at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Oulu, Finland. He received his Ph.D. in Literary Studies from Universiti Sains Malaysia, where he also held the position of Senior Lecturer from 2018 to 2023. His research interests include diasporic literature, gender studies, and cultural studies. Dr. Pourya Asl has edited two books, Gender, Place, and Identity of South Asian Women (2022) and Urban Poetics and Politics in Contemporary South Asia and the Middle East (2023), and has published numerous articles and guest-edited several special issues on postcolonial and diasporic literature and theory for leading academic journals.

Manju Jaidka has served as a Professor and Chairperson at Panjab University. She has received numerous prestigious fellowships, including a Fulbright and two Rockefeller awards, and has held academic positions at top international universities. The author of over 30 books and nearly 100 research papers, she is also a creative writer and has published poetry, fiction, and drama. The WHO commissioned her non-fiction work on disability management. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Indian Writing in English and the Springer Encyclopedia of Diasporic Indian Writing in English are major additions to her oeuvre.