Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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Daren Shiau and Lee Wei Fen, eds. Coast: Fifty Three Works Titled Coast; A Mono-titular Anthology of Singapore Writing
Get PDFInterpreting a Culinary Montage: Food in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies
Get PDFJhumpa Lahiri, a Bengali American writer who rose to fame on being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her first work of fiction, is well known for her generous use of culinary images in her fiction. She writes about Bengali Americans and the daily challenges they face in their lives. This paper intends to examine the relevance of food consumption and its significance at the personal level as well as the broader political level in Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Maladies (1999). At the textual level, the paper shows that food acts as an aid to compensate for the understated narrative style of the author. Further, this paper underpins the fact that food not only acts as an identity marker but also negotiates personal, racial, sexual and social identities of the immigrant subjects
Transitional Identities and the Unhomed Space in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Tishani Doshi’s The Pleasure Seekers
Get PDFThe diaspora appears to be an expansive space, in which the individual must constantly move through a complex maze of ever evolving identities that are embedded in the specific conditions of his or her diaspora. These evolving identities determine and influence the way in which an individual relates to the diasporic experience and imagines himself/herself and the home. This article explores and analyses the conflicts, affirmations and appropriations of the “home†comprehended through the processes of “unhoming,†“dislocation†and “identities†as they emanate and evolve within the diasporic space, in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) and Tishani Doshi’s The Pleasure Seekers (2010). The in-between space that separates and bridges the private and public spheres at the same time, is analysed for the agency it exerts in subjecting identities to the conditions of hybridisations, fixations or states of constant transit. Contemporary theorists from the Postcolonial and Diaspora literatures suggest a move away from essentialist conceptualisations of the nation and culture to a more discursive discourse in contextualising the complex process of home-making. This article attempts to foreground the subtle interactions between the processes of home-making and visualise emergence of an altered notion of home and identities that transgress the fixations of locating and dislocating
Paradoxes of Generational Breaks and Continuity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake
Get PDFJhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake (2003) shifts its focal point from the first generation of immigrants to the second, in the process establishing interconnectedness of the two generations. While opportunity, movement, displacement and stabilisation form the sequence that defines the lives of the first generation immigrants, the lives of their children, the second generation, revolves around the issues of belonging – whether they belong to the country of their origin or to the country of their birth and whether to adhere to the culture and tradition of their parents or to subscribe to the standards of their immediate world outside home. The article analyses the movement of the two generations of Ganguli family in the United States and the various ways in which they are divided and united in the novel. The focus is on the aspects of cultural variance and assimilation between the two generations
The Return of the Native, But Not Alone! in Tishani Doshi’s The Pleasure Seekers and Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s Secret Daughter
Get PDFTransnationalism has failed to become an unqualified boon because of the threats of neo-colonialism ingrained in it. This has put the Expatriate Indian novelists in an even more uncomfortable position lately, as a feeling of otherisation continues to haunt them at both entry and exit points. Hence, to resist the threats of neocolonisation and xenophobia, to overcome feelings of aloofness and loss incurred by the diasporic movement, and finally, to reaffirm their closeness to India, a clutch of contemporary Expatriate novelists have “returned†to the site of Indian family. In most cases, the presented picture has been utopian, but in its exhilarating nature and expansiveness, the site can, as the writers have attempted in showing, be effectively projected as a succour to the fractured life of the West. Consequently, the site has always remained an object of desire to all those who have been dislodged from it. My paper aims to read Tishani Doshi’s The Pleasure Seekers (2010) and Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s Secret Daughter (2010) to explore this issue
