Unit III: Intersectionality of Identity

Summary

Unit III invites students to interrogate the ways in which multiple social categories converge to produce unique modes of discrimination and privilege within diasporic contexts. The unit begins with an overview of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality theory, emphasizing its relevance for analyzing literature and film that depict migrant and minority experiences. Students then engage with three primary texts: Adichie’s “The Thing Around Your Neck,” which foregrounds the gendered dimensions of racial micro‑aggressions in a corporate setting; Nair’s Mississippi Masala, a cinematic portrayal of an Indian‑African‑American romance set against the legacies of Ugandan Asian expulsion and Southern U.S. racism; and Kureishi’s “My Son the Fanatic,” a narrative that dramatizes the clash between secular liberalism and emergent religious piety within a Pakistani‑British family. Throughout the unit, learners are encouraged to trace how ethnicity, skin colour, class, gender, religion, and generational trauma intersect, producing complex identity negotiations. The unit culminates in comparative essays, film analysis worksheets, and research prompts that require students to apply intersectional lenses to diaspora texts while citing scholarly sources.

Characters

Although the unit encompasses different media, several central figures embody the intersectional tensions explored.

Akunna (Adichie’s “The Thing Around Your Neck”): A young Nigerian woman navigating a New York workplace where subtle racist and sexist remarks erode her sense of belonging. Her internal struggle highlights the gendered amplification of racial bias.
Mina (Mississippi Masala): An Indian‑Ugandan woman who falls in love with Demetrius, an African‑American carpet cleaner. Mina’s character embodies the negotiation of ethnic heritage, skin‑colour politics, and familial expectations.
Demetrius (Mississippi Masala): An African‑American man whose relationship with Mina challenges both intra‑community prejudices and broader societal racism.
Parvez (“My Son the Fanatic”): A Pakistani‑British taxi driver who embraces secular liberalism and hopes his son will assimilate into English culture.
Ali (“My Son the Fanatic”): Parvez’s son, who turns to radical Islam, seeking a sense of authenticity and resistance against perceived cultural erosion.
Supporting Figures: Includes Auntie and Uncle characters in Adichie’s story who represent diasporic communal pressures; the jazz club patrons in Mississippi Masala who illustrate temporary racial blending; and the mosque community in Kureishi’s narrative that offers Ali an alternative identity framework.

Plot

Each text presents a distinct narrative arc that serves as a case study for intersectional analysis.

Adichie – “The Thing Around Your Neck”

Akunna immigrates to the United States for university, hoping to achieve academic and professional success.
She secures a corporate job but encounters daily micro‑aggressions: colleagues comment on her accent, assume she is less competent, and make jokes about African cultures.
These incidents are gendered; male coworkers often direct sexualized remarks, while female coworkers sometimes exclude her from informal networks.
Akunna’s internal monologue reveals a growing sense of invisibility and the “thing around your neck” metaphor—a feeling of being constricted by intersecting stereotypes.
The story concludes with Akunna’s quiet resignation, suggesting that survival in such environments often requires suppressing aspects of one’s identity.

Nair – Mississippi Masala

The film opens with the expulsion of Ugandan Asians in 1972, forcing Mina’s family to relocate to Mississippi.
Years later, Mina works at her family’s motel and meets Demetrius, a carpet cleaner who introduces her to the local jazz scene.
Their romance blossoms amidst shared love of music, yet both families express disapproval: Mina’s parents fear cultural dilution, while Demetrius’s friends question his loyalty to the African‑American community.
A pivotal jazz club sequence shows black and Indian musicians collaborating, symbolizing a temporary blur of racial boundaries.
External pressures intensify when a racist incident at a local fair leads to violence, prompting Mina and Demetrius to confront whether their love can withstand societal hostility.
The film ends ambiguously, with the couple deciding to leave town together, suggesting that escape may be the only viable route to preserve their union.

Kureishi – “My Son the Fanatic”

Parvez, a Pakistani immigrant, prides himself on his secular lifestyle and encourages Ali to adopt British customs.
Ali begins to reject his father’s values, gravitating toward a more orthodox interpretation of Islam after encountering extremist literature.
Tensions rise as Ali criticizes Parvez’s consumption of alcohol, his relationship with a German prostitute, and his perceived cultural betrayal.
Parvez attempts to bridge the gap by inviting Ali to a football match, but Ali interprets the outing as a frivolous distraction from religious duty.
The climax occurs when Ali confronts his father about the moral shortcomings of Western society, accusing him of complicity in cultural imperialism.
The story concludes with Parvez’s bewildered silence, underscoring the generational and ideological chasm that intersectional forces—religion, masculinity, migrant status—have widened.

Themes

The unit’s thematic core revolves around how overlapping identity markers produce distinct experiences of marginalization, resistance, and belonging.

Intersectional Oppression: Demonstrated through Akunna’s gendered racial micro‑aggressions, Mina’s navigation of ethnicity and skin colour, and Ali’s convergence of youth, religiosity, and migrant suspicion.
Cultural Constriction (“the Neck”): The metaphor of a constricting neck appears in Adichie’s story and recurs in the familial expectations that limit characters’ self‑expression across all three texts.
Music as a Liminal Space: In Mississippi Masala, the jazz club offers a temporary sanctuary where racial hierarchies are softened, yet outside pressures reassert the societal order.
Generational Divide and Masculinity Crises: Parvez and Ali embody conflicting models of masculinity—secular, assimilative versus pious, resistant—highlighting how gender expectations intersect with immigrant narratives.
Belonging and Othering: Each protagonist struggles with being simultaneously “too foreign” for the host society and “too assimilated” for their ethnic community, illustrating the diaspora’s double bind.
Resistance and Agency: Despite constraints, characters exercise agency—Akunna’s quiet endurance, Mina and Demetrius’s cross‑cultural romance, Ali’s fervent religious commitment—showing varied strategies of self‑assertion.

Analysis

Applying an intersectional lens reveals how power operates along multiple, interlocking axes rather than in isolation.

Theoretical Application

Crenshaw’s framework insists that oppression is additive and multiplicative. In Adichie’s narrative, the weight of gender intensifies the racial bias Akunna faces; a male Nigerian immigrant might encounter similar racial stereotypes but would likely avoid the sexualized comments that compound her discomfort. This aligns with the unit’s discussion of “Intersectional Oppression = Σ (Axis_i × Weight_i)” as a conceptual heuristic—though the unit emphasizes qualitative interpretation over quantitative calculation.

Film Analysis: Jazz Club Scene

The jazz club in Mississippi Masala functions as a contact zone where musical collaboration enables a temporary suspension of ethnic boundaries. Drawing on Clifford’s notion of memory of homeland, the scene allows Mina and Demetrius to co‑create a shared cultural space that honors both Indian ragas and African‑American blues. Yet, as Safran’s hostility from host society theory predicts, the external world’s racist attitudes infiltrate the space once the music stops, reminding the characters that such interstitial freedoms are fragile and contingent on broader sociopolitical conditions.

Kureishi’s Father‑Son Dyad

The generational conflict in “My Son the Fanatic” can be read through intersecting axes of religion, masculinity, and post‑colonial belonging. Parvez’s secular masculinity is tied to his immigrant aspiration for economic stability and social acceptance; Ali’s turn to radical Islam re‑asserts a masculinity rooted in religious piety and anti‑Western sentiment. The quote “He wanted to be a good Muslim, but his father wanted him to be a good Englishman” encapsulates the clash of cultural scripts, illustrating how immigrant families become battlegrounds for competing definitions of authenticity.

Pedagogical Implications

The comparative essay prompt—contrasting gendered agency in Adichie’s female protagonists with the masculinity crisis in Kureishi’s father‑son dyad—forces students to parse how gender operates differently across texts. The film analysis worksheet, which asks learners to identify three intersectional moments in Mississippi Masala and connect them to diaspora theories, encourages close reading of visual and auditory cues (e.g., costume, language, diegetic music) as evidence of intersecting identity performance.

Conclusion

Unit III demonstrates that diaspora identity cannot be understood through a single lens of race, ethnicity, or nationality alone. By foregrounding intersectionality, the unit equips students with a nuanced analytical toolkit capable of uncovering the layered ways power shapes lived experience in migrant and minority contexts. The selected texts—Adichie’s incisive short story, Nair’s evocative film, and Kureishi’s tense family drama—each provide a rich terrain for examining how gender, class, religion, generation, and skin colour intertwine to produce both oppression and moments of resistance. Through sustained close reading, comparative writing, and research grounded in scholarly discourse, learners will emerge prepared to apply intersectional methodologies not only to literature and film but also to broader sociocultural analyses of diasporic life.