Between Two Shores: Cultural Adaptation, Hybrid Identity, and the Assertion of Selfhood in Mitali Perkins's Monsoon Summer and You Bring the Distant Near

Abstract

     Mitali Perkins plays a vital role in contemporary young adult literature. She portrays the interior geography of cultural displacement with rare emotional precision. Perkins's salient novels Monsoon Summer and You Bring the Distant Near are renowned and are often considered twins in the second-generation immigrant experience. The discourse on received memory comes not from their ancestors but from their current lived experiences in the USA.

     This article analyses how Perkins conceives cultural adaptation not as a twofold choice between adaptation and conservation, but as an organic, deeply personal process through which young protagonists build their own hybrid identities. Based on theories of third space, hybridity, and diaspora identity, the article argues that Perkins's fiction captures the capacity of young people to honour ancestral roots while asserting an irreducibly individual selfhood – a selfhood that belongs fully to neither culture yet is enriched by both. This article demonstrates how Perkins represents generational rigidities and emotional alienation within immigrant families as fundamental aspects of identity formation. The protagonists experience cultural in-betweenness when they are forced to mediate between familial expectations and personal ambitions. Perkins seldom presents hybridity as a crisis; instead, she transforms it into a site of creative self-fashioning and emotional resilience. Through everyday experiences involving friendship, education, romance, and family obligations, the novels confirm how diasporic youth gradually build fluid identities that resist fixed cultural boundaries.

     This article examines how cultural adaptation and selfhood assertion function as permeating themes in both novels, thereby highlighting the changing aspirations of young adult immigrants in the USA using the theory of third space. It situates her fiction within the theoretical framework of Bhabha’s third space, Stuart Hall’s production of diasporic identity, and Du Bois’s double consciousness. Through close textual analysis, the article shows that Perkins’s protagonists do not choose between cultures; instead, they build new, hybrid identities that belong to neither tradition yet are enriched by both.