A Post-Colonial Interpretation Of Identity In Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri, an outstanding female writer in Asian-American literature, deeply perceives the complex identity issue for the Indian immigrants. She tries to help the marginalized immigrants to utter their voices in her literary works. In addition, those works largely discuss the identity predicaments of the Indian immigrants in western culture and how the immigrants deal with such complex problem. This paper sets out to analyze the immigrants’ identity issue in Lahiri’s first debut novel The Namesake.The analysis of this novel is based mainly on the theoretical framework proposed in The Location of Culture written by Homi Bhabha and Women’s Time by Julia Kristeva. Through Bhabha’s hybridity theory and Kristeva’s feministic ideas which are analogically deduced by her linguist notion of heterogeneity, this thesis intends to explore the characters’ identity predicaments caused by the conflicts between the Bengali homeland culture and American culture and to analyze the different identity orientations among two generation immigrants. With the complexity of immigrants’ identity issue, a possible way to solve this tough issue is expected to be perceived.According to the protagonist Gogol’s hybrid identity affirmation Lahiri illustrates in this novel, the immigrants can achieve their identities by the adaption of Multiculturalism rather than by the single identity inclination.By the analysis of Bengali immigrants’ identity issue in this novel, readers could be aware of the longing for belongingness and cultural identification of the immigrants who are considered as the marginalized Other in the western country.