A Study Of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Diasporic Narratives

Jhumpa Lahiri is one of the most famous contemporary Indian American writers. Her popularity began to soar with the publication of her first short story collection Interpreter of Maladies. She won all kinds of awards by her three later books. Lahiri’s characters are well-educated, English-speaking, middle class Indian Americans who have realized their American dreams. However, they still have to bear all kinds of prejudices and biases in the main-stream society and suffer from the position of being marginal people. As a diasporic writer who is striding two cultures and living in two worlds, Lahiri has paid much attention to South Asian immigrants’ dislocation, search for nationality and belonging, their pain of border-crossing as well as imagination and pursuit for homeland.Taking diasporic theory as its theoretical framework, based on the four works Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, The Unaccustomed Earth and The Lowland, this project intends to analyze how dislocation and displacement are represented in Lahiri’s works, from the five perspectives like the dilemma of border-crossing, the sufferings of nostalgia, the imaginary homeland, the pursuit for identity and the construction of diasporic aesthetics. This study focuses on how Lahiri rewrites the South Asian diasporic experiences, including the anxiety of border-crossing and liminal identity, the pain of nostalgia, mobility of homeland, diasporic trauma, inter-generational conflicts, the alternative histories and the empowerment of immigrant women. For Lahiri, diaspora is a border-crossing and cultural translation activity which will produce a hybrid identity. Subject to the change of route and destination, diasporic homeland is only an imaginary place that is built on imagination and the broken images of the old memory. The psychological and cultural loss originating from diaspora will bring trauma. Thanks to the diasporic experience, the diasporic writer is able to understand her national history from a special perspective, thus rewriting her national history. Lahiri also thinks that diaspora can bring new opportunities, empowerment and regeneration to immigrant women. While longing for belonging, her characters are also searching for individual, cultural and national identity. Meanwhile, her narration techniques also exhibit distinctive aesthetic values. These have constructed a kind of diasporic aesthetics of "hybridity, displacement, ambiguity and Subalternity".The first chapter discusses border-crossing. For Lahiri, border-crossing is not only a biographical but also a cultural and psychological activity. Her characters experience displacement, being gazed, loss of discourse power after crossing borders, which will cause anxiety, "double consciousness" and a debased self. The second chapter deals with the suffering of nostalgia and the trauma of diaspora, like the sense of loss, rootlessness, lack of continuous identity, the cultural clashes between the first and second generation diasporic people. Lahiri’s characters express their longing for homeland and defiance for the main stream values through cooking and eating their own national food, a return trip and sticking to national traditions. The third chapter focuses on construction of imaginary homeland. The hybrid Indian communities become the bond to connect members. What’s more, such things as Indian naming customs, family photos and keepsakes can help connect the past with the present, thus constructing a spiritual home and relieving the pain of loss. The fourth chapter elaborates on the pursuit of identity. Through the rewriting of Indian Partition and Naxalite Movement, Lahiri tried to reinterpret the history from a new perspective and become a speaking voice for the silent "Subaltern". By doing so, the author hoped to unite the Indian Americans and enhance their pride and confidence for their home country. Meanwhile, by creating vivid characters as translators in her stories, she hoped the diasporic people could become a bridge to unite cultures. Lahiri also hoped that her characters could pursue their cultural identity through becoming multi-cultural cosmopolitans which was also a way to express the author’s concern for ethics and ideal of the world justice. In the fifth chapter, Lahiri also used special narrative techniques like nonlinear narratives, multiple structures and temporal and spatial narration. These techniques are very conducive to expressing such themes as hybridity, ambiguity, displacement.Through the writing of Indian diaspora, Lahiri’s characters have finished their identity shift from rootless exiles to multi-cultural cosmopolitans. Meanwhile, the author holds that being not necessarily a negative feeling, diaspora also includes some positive aspects like rebellion, reclaiming, innovation and creativity. Through her writing, on the one hand, Lahiri has become a speaking voice for the Indian Subaltern in the American mainstream society; on the other hand, she has also constructed a kind of distinctive Indian diasporic aesthetics which includes hybridity, displacement, ambiguity and Subalternity.