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Mapping America, Re-Mapping The World: The Cosmopolitanism Of Agha Shahid Ali's A Nostalgist's Map Of America, Xiwen Mai

Graduate English Association New Voices Conference 2007

Published in 1991, Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali‘s collection A Nostalgist‘s Map of America is a book about the poet‘s travel in America. From ―"the dead center of Pennsylvania" to Indian reservations in New Mexico, the collection weaves multiple landscapes, texts, and emotions into a map of America, on which the poet‘s traveling routes lead to thinking about language, identity, colonial and neocolonial politics. While critics like Lawrence Needham, Jeannie Chiu, and Rajini Srikanth, in reading the collection, have all focused on his themes of nostalgia, melancholy, and loss as an exile, this paper argues that Ali‘s ―"map of America" …