The local and the global: Gina Nahai and the taking up of serpents and stereotypes

Abstract

Region, home and transnational migration are explored in terms of the transcultural complexities that reverberate through Iranian American Gina Nahai's Sunday's Silence. Nahai grapples with stereotypes that attach to the Holiness churches in the east Tennessee region of Appalachia. This essay argues that the novel's politics rest on the intersubjectivity of strangers as bound into a metaphysics of desire. It is through this paradigm that Nahai writes against the reductive association of “minority” literature with discrete “national” models and through which she explores the local and the regional in a culturally complex narrative about the crisis of alterity