The Technological Hybrid as Post-American: Cross-Cultural Genetics in Jasmine

Abstract

By definition a postcolonial writer, Bharati Mukherjee is no multiculturalist. She took explicit aim at the term in 1994: emphasizes the differences between racial heritages. This emphasis on the differences has too often led to the dehumanization of the different. And dehumanization leads to discrimination. And discrimination can ultimately lead to genocide. Later she writes, Parents express rage or despair at their U.S.-born children's forgetting of, or indifference to, some aspects of Indian culture.... I would ask: What is it we have lost if our children are acculturating into the culture in which we are living? (Beyond Multiculturalism 2C). She is plainly disinterested in the preservation of cultures, the hallowing of tradition, obligations to the past; at least, she is not interested in the nostalgic aspects of such preservation. Rather, her current work forwards a distinction between pioneers and pitiable others for whom attachments to personal and cultural pasts foreclose possibilities. These pioneering characters undergo personal changes in their movements from culture to culture, changes that Mukherjee characterizes in the strongest terms. In an interview from 1988, she discussed the origins of her fictional characters' immigration experiences in her own (from Bengal to the U.S., and then to Canada before returning to the U.S.): We [immigrants] have experienced rapid changes in the history of the nations in which we lived. When we uproot ourselves from those countries and come here, either by choice or out of necessity, we suddenly must absorb 200 years of history and learn to adapt to society. Our lives are remarkable, often heroic.... Although they [the fictional immigrant characters] are often hurt or depressed by setbacks in their new lives and occupations, they do not give up. They take risks they wouldn't have taken in their old, comfortable worlds to solve their problems. As they change citizenship, they are reborn. (1988 Interview 654) Using the category of for these changes avows their thoroughness and also, by opposing rebirth to comfort, implies a quality of anxiety and even violence therein. Mukherjee is so far from veneration of tradition that her works accept--indeed, embrace--the violence that accompanies cross-cultural revision and personal change. One of her most important and famous heroines, Jasmine, says: There are no harmless, compassionate ways to remake ourselves. We murder who we were so we can rebirth ourselves in the image of dreams (Jasmine 25). It is the willingness of Jasmine and others of Mukherjee's ethnic characters to murder their past selves that enables them to actively advance into unknown but promising futures. The futures they propel themselves toward--and even help to shape--are not guaranteed to be successful, but do have the potential for personal, material and spiritual success. By contrast, those of her characters who hold onto history, the past, and their past places in their cultures simply for the sake of maintaining its traditions are doomed to failure, stasis, and often death. Most significantly for the student of literature, she articulates her central subjects' productive violence quite closely with the ideology of progress and risk--using such dearly held tropes as the frontier, the cowboy/pioneer, and the astronaut to mark her heroes and heroines. Just as importantly, however, she separates America--as an ideal space/temporality of continuous self-invention--from America's dominant citizens. In revisionary-subversive response to the nativist ideology which holds that Anglo-Americans are the blessed children and international acolytes of this ideal, Mukherjee turns the tables. In her works, many Anglo-Americans become spiritually, emotionally, and even physically crippled, overwhelmed by the obligations of living up to America's potent promises and traditions, while some first-generation immigrants--ethnic Americans, though she dislikes qualifying American in any way. …