Hawthorne and the Problem of Immigrant Fiction in Jhumpa Lahiri's Hema and Kaushik

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article considers Jhumpa Lahiri's exploration of the tensions that manifest within the category of immigrant fiction through a reading of Hema and Kaushik , a short story cycle that functions as a hybrid parody of the form and content of two of Nathaniel Hawthorne's works: The Scarlet Letter and The Marble Faun . It argues that Lahiri challenges reductive conceptualizations of immigrant identity while spotlighting key differences between Hawthorne's fictionalized Anglo-Saxon immigrants and her fictionalized South Asian ones. She tacitly comments on Hawthorne's politics and on the politics of art and literature as lenses into the South Asian immigrant experience in what Edoardo Campanella and Marta Dassù characterize as Anglo-nostalgic times. Ultimately, Lahiri mourns her fictionalized immigrants' disempowerment while inviting her readers to persevere where her protagonists fail: through furthering conversations about the politics of immigrant identity, hybridity in its different forms, and Anglo-nostalgic impulses that threaten to subvert the agency of hybrid and marginalized individuals in and beyond the United States.