Yearning for identity in the glimmer of America: a corpus-assisted analysis of the south asian american diaspora literature

The analysis of diaspora and its characteristics have constituted a substantial body of recent studies and researchers in different disciplines have tried to provide a new definition of diaspora. There are several reasons for the growing interest in the notion of diaspora, the most important of which is the possibility it provides to question the basic, yet fundamental concepts. Diaspora breaks the conceptual relations between concepts and their meanings and acts as a third space for them to be redefined all over again. Diaspora deconstructs the meaning of home, identity, culture, language, memories, ethnicity, belonging and traditions and by doing so, forces those in diaspora to re-evaluate the meanings, re-establish the connections and reread themselves using the newly defined concepts. Given that diaspora provides a space for concepts to be in the process of becoming and not being, it also makes it possible for the stereotypes to be revisited and redefined. South Asian Americans are one of the most significant minority groups in the United States who not only contributed to the advancement of the Diaspora literature but also tried to redefine themselves and the existing stereotypes about them. This study aimed to uncover the central framework of the South Asian American Diasporic literature and to investigate the linguistic and literary patterns of it. The evaluation was carried out through the employment of the corpus analytical methods, including keywords, concordance, and collocations on the compiled corpus for this study. The analyses of the corpus revealed the distinguishing features of the South Asian American Diaspora literature written by the female authors and identified the embedded ideas within the context of this group. This study also illustrated the similarities and the differences between the findings of this study using corpus analytical methods and the literary readings. The findings of this study can be helpful in identifying the benefits of computational criticism in the study of literature.