This study began with the premise that – despite some significant cultural and artistic cross-currents between contemporary South Asian Americans and British Asians – the field of transatlantic literary studies has not paid enough attention to the parallel growth of South Asian writing in Britain and the United States since the early 1970s. South Asian Atlantic Literature has sought to fill this scholarly gap by focusing on the dominant, yet in many cases critically neglected, tropes employed by these writers. In so doing, it has presented particular literary texts as belonging to a distinct body of work and as the basis for a sustained comparison, despite some key differences, both formally and in terms of the background of the writers themselves.

In Chapter 1, I examined the thematic and rhetorical importance of home, contending that it is of equal significance to writers on both sides of the Atlantic, although regional questions seem of greater concern to British Asian authors, possibly because more South Asians live in Britain proportionate to the overall population than in the US, and have done so over a longer period. South Asian Atlantic writers consistently return to interior and domestic spaces, specifically exploring their gendered implications and their status as a safe, enduring alternative to the problematic nature of national belonging in both the United States and Britain.