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 in her works. Perkins's salient novels Monsoon Summer and You Bring the Distant Near are known for their eminence, and considered twins in the second-generation immigrants’ life experience. The discourse about received memory is actually not from their ancestors but from current living experiences in the USA. This article analyses how Perkins conceives the theme of 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 intermediate between familial expectations and personal ambitions. Perkins seldom draws out hybridity as a crisis alone, she rather transforms it into a site of creative self-fashioning and emotional resilience. By the 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 paper examines how cultural adaptation and selfhood assertion function as permeating themes in both the 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. By a close textual analysis, the article validates that Perkins’s protagonists do not decide between cultures; instead, they build new, hybrid identities that belong completely to neither tradition yet are enriched by both.