This volume was conceived as a space to provide visibility for South Asian women writers whose work has not had much exposure in the West. It contributes to the knowledge of South Asian women writers by including scholarship not only on little-known writers but also by scholars from India – in particular, those whose voices do not necessarily find themselves in western academic publications. Many South Asian women writers engage with the overall quest for survival, which can be affiliated with all the themes expressed in this volume: trauma, diaspora, injustice, resistance, place, space, language, and identity. The texts discussed herein contribute to the ongoing discourse related to such themes in postcolonial studies and transnational literature, and could be used in courses on South Asian literature, women’s writing, postcolonial studies and literature, and world or transnational literature.

Feroza Jussawalla is Professor of English at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Family Quarrels: Towards a Criticism of Indian Writing in English (Peter Lang, 1985) and of a collection of poems, Chiffon Saris (2003); editor of Conversations with V. S. Naipaul and co-editor with Reed Way Dasenbrock of Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World; and editor of Border Crossing, the special online issue of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Review (2012). She is the author of numerous articles in Indian, European, and U.S. literary critical journals. Deborah Fillerup Weagal holds a PhD. in English with an emphasis in postcolonial literature and is term teaching faculty at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of Interconnections: Essays on Music, Art, Literature, and Gender (2004), Women and Contemporary World Literature: Power, Fragmentation, and Metaphor (2009), and Words and Music: Camus, Beckett, Cage, Gould (2010). Her articles have appeared in the South Asian Review, the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, an anthology on Rohinton Mistry, and a variety of other scholarly journals.