Resilient women: transnational homes and identities in Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age

Foregrounding theoretical expositions of the home and identity, this paper examines historical novel by Bangladeshi author Tahmima Anam entitled A Golden Age (2007), which explores gendered roles within familial separation during political unrest. Using a transnational lens, it addresses shifting meanings of home and identity amidst nation-fragmentation during the politically fractious period of Bangladesh liberation war. Deploying a historico-literary imagination, the novel's emphasis on women's intimate struggles to keep family intact offer insights into meanings of home in terms of mother-child ties and geopolitical tensions that shape new borders within domestic and national spaces. As a point of departure, Kuah-Pearce's concept of transnational identities is applied to make sense of private and communal selves of female characters whose articulations of (un)homely affiliations in times of transnational crises are a means to redefine their resilience, and critique the practices of discrimination and segregation that disrupt the space of the home.