Is desi lit coded female?
2008 May 20
It recently struck me that if you look at even non-cliché South Asian lit covers, such as the U.S. cover for Gifted, they usually have fabricky patterns or some kind of foliage. This is true even of novels on weighty topics, such as A Golden Age, about the Bangladesh genocide. There are some exceptions such as The Konkans, and the aggressively masculine covers of Sacred Games and Londonstani (crime novels) and Tourism (urban fic).
It’s not clear how much of this is that South Asian culture is seen as feminine in America, and how much is generic to literary fiction. Are language and craft and design coded female?
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