Fractured Landscape, Flowing Culture & Fabricated Identities: Exploring and Evoking the Transnational Middle Class in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction

Abstract

The transnational middle class provides us with notions about culture-areas that overlap several nation-states, or of multicultural nations. Cultural diversity, historical memory, and societal organizations are never inscribed on a neutral grid in transnational space. Amitav Ghosh invokes a crucial inquiry of transnationalism: how do we locate the hybrid middle class transnational culture? Does the transnational encounter unsettle the idea that cultures and countries are analogous, leading to a new middle-class culture? In my paper I am going to explore how transnationalism complicates the relationship between space and culture. How the question of interpreting social change and cultural transformation as occurring within interconnected areas is raised by the fractured landscape of independent nations and sovereign cultures. We can see that identity of place emerges from a specific dialogic involvement in a framework of hierarchically organized spaces with its cultured fabrication as a community in the middleclass notions of locality or community, which refer to both a demarcated physical space and clusters of interaction. Ghosh's transnational middle class has been mobile and identities less fixed than the static approaches of classical anthropology. The rapidly growing and intensifying movement of the middle class, combined with a rejection of cultural products and practices, has created a profound sense of loss of territorial roots, erosion of place cultural distinctiveness, and anthropological theory ferment. In the world of Diaspora, transnational cultural flows and mass movement of populations, old-fashioned attempts to map the globe as a set of culture regions or homelands are bewildered by a dazzling zrray of postcolonial simulacra, doublings and redoubling.