＂Strike Their Roots into Unaccustomed Earth＂ in an Era of New Genetics: Diasporic Identity Politics and Genealogy Re-Considered in Jhumpa Lahiri's ＂Unaccustomed Earth＂

Abstract

Views of identity formation are roughly divided into two competing camps, based on the concepts of ＂biological determination＂ (also known as biologism) and ＂social constructionism,＂ and the debate over the key meaning of human behavior and self-identity can be seen as paralleling the split between materialism and idealism. However, the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, which revealed much in terms of our biological ancestry, has also raised ethical dilemmas and questions with regard to the nature of race and self-identity. Given the emerging ascendancy of bio-genetic accounts of human life, the conceptualization of individualized identity has re-energized old debates about sameness and difference in identity origination mechanisms, and even led to a rise in racialized politics. This issue is even more pivotal and controversial in today's era of increasing transnationalism, as the impact of genomics on mapping human genealogy has raised the issue of whether racial identity or ethnicity denotes any biological reality. This paper will analyze the Bengali American writer Jhumpa Lahiri's short story ＂Unaccustomed Earth,＂ exploring the interweaving notions ofrace, kinship and family genealogy to create a more sophisticated understanding of the tangled, heterogeneous process of identity formation embedded in the South Asian diaspora. To further inquire into the full view of racialized politics in Lahiri's immigrant writing, the following analysis focuses on how horticulturality is associated with the ideas of genealogy and kinship that delineate the saga of a South Asian immigrant family, and on the re-examination of father- and motherdaughter relationships through the lens of neoliberalism, as the links that enable the continuity of family genealogy.