Transculturation And The Immigrant Experience In Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake (2003) chronicles the life experience of aBengali immigrant family in American society. The novel focuses on two generations ofthe Bengali-American immigrants and it spans over thirty years. As the novel reveals, theimmigrants’ lives assume differences in themes and extent of difficulty as the subjectvaries. On a general basis, the characters encounter multifaceted difficulties, variouschanges occur in their lives, and their immigrant identity and cultural positioning aregradually (re)configured. With a redefinition of Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of“transculturation”, my thesis firstly takes a processual approach to analyze therepresentation of the ongoing dynamics in the characters’ transculturation process.Subsequently, the study approaches from an interactive relational perspective to scrutinizethe transculturation difficulty experienced by the immigrants, which stem from problematicinteractive relations exhibited at the immigrant family and in the cross-cultural encountersin American society. The results of the study show that first, individual characters’ genderrole, past and history, and social encounters interweave with the national culturalinfluences, and they (re)configure the immigrant’ cultural positioning. Then, silence,miscommunication, and misunderstanding all contribute to the immigrant’stransculturation difficulty in the American culture.