Interpreter Of Maladies Research Articles

English

Michel Foucault’s notion of neoliberal governmentality is important in the context of the portrayal of the private sphere of the family by diasporic writers. Family, which is generally defined in terms of its functionality, when considering the difficulties of integration into the non-natal culture from the perspective of the uprooted migrants, is often referred to, erroneously, as the locus of privacy, individuality and autonomy. Among the works of the contemporary writers of Indian diaspora experience in America, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies (1999) has addressed issues of displacement, assimilation and acculturation modifying Indian diaspora individuals and families. This essay analyses two of her short stories “Mrs. Sen’s” and “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” to examine the strategies employed to monitor, regulate and (re)form racial and gendered identities within the seemingly private domain of the Indian diaspora families in the process of establishing a socially acceptable congruence of images for the members of the migrant family. Using the personal sphere of the family as an example of constraint that perpetually fixes subjects to their disciplinary apparatuses, Lahiri portrays the capillary functioning of it through various acts of looking. This essay seeks to explore some of the complex dynamics of the gaze in Lahiri’s stories with a particular focus on the coercive character of power and the unequal gendering of the (examining) gaze. Keywords: neoliberalism; governmentality; gaze; homogenization; power

ŽIVOT IZMEĐU DVE KULTURE: EGZIL U DELU TUMAČ BOLESTI DŽAMPE LAHIRI

Zbirka priča Tumač bolesti Džampe Lahiri bavi se životima indijskih imigranata u Sjedinjenim Američkim Državama. Protagonisti ovih priča žive između indijske i američke kulture tragajući za svojim identitetom i kulturnom pripadnošću. Njihov život daleko od domovine karakteriše stanje egzila i izmeštenosti zbog nemogućnosti da se u potpunosti uklope u kulturu nove zemlje te da se oslobode nostalgije prema domovini. Tema egzila posebno se izdvaja u tri priče iz pomenute zbirke: Gospođa Sen, Kada je gospodin Prizada dolazio na večeru i Treći i poslednji kontinent. Cilj rada je da istraži temu egzila u ovim pričama. Kao osnova za analizu pomenutih priča poslužiće teorije o egzilu Edvarda Saida i Nika Izrela.

Diasporic Space: a Site of Contestation and Reconciliation in Interpreter of Maladies and The Middleman and Other Stories

This paper explores the space of diaspora in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and Bharati Mukherjee’s The Middleman and Other Stories. Both the authors present diasporic context, in which the immigrants hold an in-between space between home and host. The expatriates maintain emotional ties with the country of their origin resisting assimilation into the structure of the host society. Diasporic societies present the individuals with the challenge of balancing a dual orientation: acculturation into an alien culture and attachment for the home culture. Such a condition of dual orientation is the problem for research. The research attempts to answer this question: how the location of diaspora ̶ a third space ̶ is formed and what is the impact of dialectics between home and host on the lives of the diasporic people, and how they negotiate between incompatible elements to shape this third space. The growing trend of diaspora, a phenomenon of global migration, and its impact on established relations needs academic attention. The paper contextualizes the theoretical concept of diaspora in fictional representations. It adopts the modern theoretical concepts of diaspora and contextualizes them in Interpreter of Maladies and The Middleman and Other Stories. The dialectical relation between the host and home world shapes an in-between space which comes into existence through reconciliation between two different forces.

English

The panoptic gaze is vested in with a constitutive impact upon the subjectivity of individuals. Feminist scholars like Luce Irigaray have charged that the metaphor of vision is intimately connected with the construction of gender and sexual difference. By pointing to the masculine logic of Western thought, Irigaray confirms that a woman’s entry into a dominant scopic economy signifies her inevitable confinement to passivity. This essay aims to examine the sexual politics of metaphors of vision in a literary text that is controversially argued to be a voice for the subordinated Indian immigrant women in the US. As one of the most influential schools of thought in Western philosophy, the Sartrean paradigm of sexual difference is employed to investigate this allegation by identifying the latent binary system at work in the fiction of Jhumpa Lahiri, who has garnered substantial yet controversial critical attention over her representations of gender. Specifically, this essay focuses on Lahiri’s prefatory story to her Pulitzer Prize-winning short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies (2000), to unravel the manner her exercise of vision in this narrative perpetuates the dichotomies of a male subject and a female object pre-established in the traditional hierarchies of gender in the West. In this story, Lahiri (un)wittingly privileges masculinity over femininity and reduces the latter to a typically disgusting Sartrean female body of holes and slime. Hence, notwithstanding infrequent emasculated images of the male subject, it is ultimately the masculine that, in the battle of looks between male and female, nihilates the Other to the state of “being-in-itself” and enjoys supremacy over the feminine. DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/gema-2016-1602-08

Blank Spaces: Outdated Maps and Unsettled Subjects in Jhumpa Lahiri’sInterpreter of Maladies

Blank Spaces: Outdated Maps and Unsettled Subjects in Jhumpa Lahiri’s<i>Interpreter of Maladies</i>

Cultural Congruity as a Major Divergence in Jhumpa Lahiri's “Interpreter of Maladies”

Diasporic writing deals with issues like loneliness, nostalgia, alienation, identity crisis, racial discrimination, rootlessness, assimilation and acculturation encountered by the immigrants. Writers of the Indian Diaspora like Bharati Mukerjee, Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, V.S. Naipaul, Divakaruni, Rohinton Mistry etc., excel in describing the above mentioned problems faced by Indian immigrants in the foreign countries. Among these writers, Jhumpa lahiri is a notable second generation diasporic writer who has carved a niche for herself in the corpus of Diaspora Literature. She is acclaimed to be the second generation diasporic writer as she was born to immigrant parents from Bengal who settled in the U.S. In addition, her writings focus on the plight and sufferings of the second generation Indian immigrants. Her writing style, selection of themes and choice of characters have received greater attention among the readers worldwide. Interpreter of Maladies is a Pulitzer Prize winning short story collection by Jhumpa lahiri that describe the struggles faced by Indian immigrants in the U.S. Lahiri deals with the plight of the second generation immigrants. This paper aims to highlight the problems of cultural assimilation among the Indian immigrants in America as discussed by Lahiri in Interpreter of maladies.

The Archaeology of the Colonial—Un-earthing Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth

The Archaeology of the Colonial—Un-earthing Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth Michael Wutz (bio) We need to stop assuming a one-to-one correspondence between the geographic origins of a text and its evolving radius of literary action. We need to stop thinking of national literatures as the linguistic equivalents of territorial maps. Wai Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet”1 Since the publication of her Pulitzer prize-winning debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), Jhumpa Lahiri has come to be seen as a preeminent interpreter of the postcolonial condition of the Indian diaspora. By chronicling the lives of, mostly, privileged Bengalis transitioning into the West, she has mapped the anxieties of a population caught in the dual allegiance of transcontinental citizenship. At the same time, critics have ascribed the appeal of her work, in the United States and abroad, to her skillful portrayal of dislocation and generational crises, which has been judged to carry the universalizing qualities of serious, ambitious fiction. As the editors of Naming Jhumpa Lahiri observe, Lahiri’s work “sheds light on both universal dimensions of human experience and more specific Bengali, postcolonial, Indian diasporic, South Asian American, and Asian American politics.”2 Exceeding this concentric reach, Lahiri has also been grouped with a cadre of contemporary writers that has slid out of—or rather, beyond—the loose mesh of the postmodern vocabulary. Rachel Adams has recently identified Lahiri as an avatar of a newly emergent “American literary globalism,” which she understands as a generalized [End Page 243] feeling of social simultaneity across national borders, boundaries, and oceans, and which succeeds the more narrowly-Western aesthetic imperatives of the postmodern: “Relatively unburdened by the legacies of Euro-American modernism or the politics of the Cold War, their fiction reacts against the aesthetic sensibilities of high postmodernism while providing American literature with a new set of genealogical, geographic, and temporal referents.”3 This configuration of referents—from genealogy and geography to time, especially the vast temporalities of geologic time—is indeed fully evident in Lahiri’s work and provides the framework for a sustained eco-critical reading of Lahiri’s collection of stories and novellas, Unaccustomed Earth (2008). While Adams is primarily interested in mapping a global sensibility in American fiction that is operative in the present, I want to extend those terms, both historically and geologically, into the past and future by combining them with the thematic foci Lahiri’s work has, so far almost exclusively, been identified with: postcoloniality and immigration. Those twin themes provide the narrative spark for the stories in Maladies, but don’t extend into historical or temporal reflection. The intergenerational vector of The Namesake (2003), Lahiri’s first novel, is driven by time and change, but historical or geological ruptures are largely absent from its texture. The Lowland (2013), Lahiri’s most recent novel, is rich with a colonial and ecological sensibility that suggests centuries of human intervention and biological niche-building, but doesn’t explore them against planetary and geological time. Only with Unaccustomed Earth does Lahiri locate the story of migration and resettlement within the immensities of a transhistorical scale;4 and only Unaccustomed Earth—as its earth-bound title already suggests—carries the imprint of a deeply felt environmental and ecological sensibility in its texture. The presence of natural history within a typically more narrow human history; an awareness of the agency of natural or nonhuman forces; a sense of human accountability for its impact on the earth; and an understanding of the dynamic processes of the natural world—Lawrence Buell’s criteria for the identification of literary texts as being properly imbued with environmental and ecological concerns are all fully realized in Lahiri’s collection.5 It is against this geological, geographical, and ecological background that I want to offer a reading of Unaccustomed Earth that revolves around the figurative axis of its title: the earth. I submit that Lahiri articulates a multi-leveled theory of postcoloniality through the trope of the earth itself, the terrific and terrifying terrain having offered humans habitation for millenia. As a layering of tensional plate tectonics, the imbricated strata of the earth’s crust become a figure for...

Cultural Translation of a Subject in Transit:

Cultural Translation of a Subject in Transit:

Signifying without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama by Stephanie Li

Reviewed by: Signifying without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama by Stephanie Li Marquis Bey (bio) Li, Stephanie. Signifying without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2012. In Signifying without Specifying Stephanie Li illustrates to readers the unique contemporary use of racial language employed by American politicians and writers. This language, she says, is what Toni Morrison has called “race-specific, race-free language,” which Li claims is epitomized by President Obama. She begins her text with an anecdotal memory about her parents’ use of this “race-specific, race-free language,” a language that she says is “spoken when one’s race is both known and irrelevant, that is, irrelevant because it is known,” a language whose secrets she craved to know as a child (x). Challenging the notion that we are now living in a “post-racial” society, Li suggests that we are in a moment where discourse demands that race be seen, but not uttered. Li’s specific aim is to note the way the rhetoric surrounding Obama’s presidency operates while also analyzing how “race-specific, race-free” language functions within literary texts by Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Ultimately, Li attempts “not only to describe how ‘race-specific, race-free language’ operates in contemporary literary texts and political exchange but also to critique its uses” (14). As Li presents the matter of racial language in Signifying without Specifying, this “race-specific, race-free language” pervades the contemporary social milieu and is now the way in which many prominent figures of color tread the tepid waters of universality and racial affiliation; it is a way of, as Li notes Michael Eric Dyson as saying, “wink[ing] at black America while speaking to white America” (19). Li uses Obama’s archetypal use of “race-specific, race-free language” as a frame for her literary analyses, regularly drawing parallels between the texts she analyzes and Obama’s public comments addressing race in a way that elides overtly mentioning the taboo topic, yet effectively addressing it in a manner that “signifies without specifying” race. In chapter 1, Li tackles Morrison’s novels, Paradise and A Mercy, and also her short story “Recitatif.” Chapter 2 notes the use of “race-specific, race-free language” in Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt, while chapter 3 takes a look at some of Lahiri’s stories from Interpreter of Maladies. Chapter 4 brings the text full circle and evaluates the performative intimacy of political discourse. Throughout all of her analyses, Li intersperses instances of Obama’s life and candidacy that epitomize his “race-specific, race-free” linguistic feats, maintaining the political narrative throughout her literary exegeses. One of Li’s most cogent arguments for the pervasiveness and efficacy of “race-specific, race-free language” is her analysis of Morrison’s short story, “Recitatif.” The two protagonists, Twyla and Roberta, are of different races, one white, one black. Morrison, however, never discloses which girl is what race, giving only insufficient clues to their racial identities, revealing that any reader who assigns a race to the girls “concede[s] to stereotype” (62). Li’s incorporation of this text provides a concrete example of “race-specific, race-free language” through the story’s multiple clues and indicators of race, yet absence of specific mention of either girl’s racial identity. In Li’s interpretation of Whitehead’s Apex Hides the Hurt, the protagonist conspicuously evades racial markers, which reflects his preference to eschew a racial identity even though he is an African American. The protagonist’s aspiration to be “race-free,” also reflected in the story’s Apex ad campaign’s “Dream of universality,” implies a kind of hope for [End Page 204] transcendence or postraciality in which race has no bearing on the outcomes of life. Apex demonstrates the dangerousness of “race-specific, race-free language” in that, although “it presents a necessary fulfillment of America’s most fundamental ideals,” it is incredibly dangersome “because it threatens to erase difference and history, the twin foundations of existing social dynamics” (86). Another one of Li’s best arguments is Obama’s “embodiment” of “race-specific, race-free...

Found in Translation: The Standard in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies”

The concept of standard spoken English is a confusing one. As Peter Trudgill (2002) points out, there is not even a consensus about whether it should be written with an upper case or lower case “s”. This is further complexified by the fact that the term is not used the same way by linguists and non-linguists. (Trudgill, 117) In the following paper I will be examining how the different nuances of Standard English are the source for the essential narrative tension in Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies”. After exploring the characteristics of these Englishes, the paper will demonstrate how the different facets of interpretation play a predominant role in the narrative and conclude with a reflection on to what extent reading a postcolonial work is comparable to reading works found in translation.

Changing the Dominant Discourse and Culture, One Eater at a Time

In analyzing the short story “Mrs. Sen’s” from the collection Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, researchers almost exclusively focus on the title character’s perspective and describe the text as a narrative of a first-generation female from India not being able to assimilate in the United States This perspective is valuable in its own right and belongs in the tradition of diasporic or postcolonial storytelling. Lahiri’s complex narrative, however, forms the backdrop of an even more intricate underlying, indeed subversive, narrative, of Eliot, an eleven-year-old American boy, who transforms through his exposure to Mrs. Sen. Eliot’s witnessing of Mrs. Sen’s processing of food and her (minority) cultural ways triggers that transformation. In switching the perspective from Mrs. Sen to Eliot as clandestine hero of the story, a second narrative emerges, which lends empowerment and agency to members of minority cultures. Through reading the narrative and its counter narrative simultaneously, a third space opens up in which change and approximation become possible, albeit for a very short period. The story does suggest, however, that the hardly noticeable change in Mrs. Sen and the more obvious one in Eliot will last, indicating an interpretation of the story as intervening into the current postcolonial discourse.

The journey of food from ‘When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine’ to ‘Mrs. Sen's’ in Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies

As a chronicler of cultural interface, in Jhumpa Lahiri's debut collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, food paradoxically establishes intertextuality, humanity, otherness, negotiation as well as respect, albeit in different contexts. This article tries to highlight how the highly acclaimed writer constantly underscores the politics of Bengali diaspora identity in her stories through multiple nuances of the food metaphor, highlighting the specificity of Bengali cuisine and eating etiquettes, by creating a subtle dialogue between the second and the sixth story of the collection. It intends to explore how the journey of the food metaphor from ‘When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine’ to ‘Mrs. Sen's’ works in a typical pattern of the deconstruction of hegemonic discourses, in the critique of the plight of Bengali diaspora women, in the reinterpretation of difference and, thereby, in the development of their Bengali immigrant identity.

Jhumpa Lahiri's Feminist Cosmopolitics and the Transnational Beauty Assemblage

Abstract This essay examines Indian American writer Jhumpa Lahiri's literary engagements with cosmopolitan Indian beauty and style in her short stories “Sexy” and “Interpreter of Maladies” (2003). It situates these engagements as part of a transnational beauty assemblage, a heterogeneous set of transnational cultural flows of Indian beauty and fashion, first in order to map the transnational dimensions of Indian fashion and beauty, which have remained under-explored within existing feminist scholarship on cultural economies of Indian fashion and beauty. Second, the essay shifts focus away from this scholarship's ideological critiques of the Indian fashion and beauty industries and thus away from concerns with shifting standards of beauty (what beauty is), and toward a mapping of beauty as an affective force (what beauty does). Specifically, I examine how Lahiri's stories infuse Indian female beauty with affective capacities that reassemble the semantic messages of exoticism, commodification, gendered nationalism, and transnational mobility that underwrite Indian female beauty's attachments to an elite cosmopolitanism at the end of the twentieth century. In Lahiri's stories, beauty operates as a deeply, if unevenly, socializing force within moments of cross-cultural and interracial encounter, generating affects such as estrangement, identification, and desire, which open onto articulations of citizenship and belonging. The essay further argues that Lahiri's attachments of Indian female beauty's affects to experiences of citizenship and belonging can be understood as part of her feminist, cosmopolitical literary project: Lahiri mobilizes Indian feminine beauty's affects in order to illuminate and critique late-capitalist globalization, migration, and travel as they shape narratives of citizenship and belonging.

Reinventing Cartography: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake

By taking Lahiri’s map imagery as a starting point, I reflect on the author’s portrayal of the Indian diaspora and the way she builds up a narrative that questions many of the ontological and solid beliefs established by hegemonic discourses, including the concepts of fixed identities and gender roles.

Unaccustomed Earth: The West and India in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Narrative

This article focuses on the representations of the West and of India in Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction through the analysis of one of her more significant short stories, “Mrs. Sen’s”, appearing in her collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999; Pulitzer Prize, 2000). In this short story, Lahiri uses most of the recurrent discursive strategies, themes, and motifs of her fiction, such as the use of the point of view of children, the female identity and loneliness, strangeness as a means to represent the human condition, and colours and food as cultural difference. “Mrs. Sen’s” is the story of the meeting of two kinds of loneliness and two cultures, that of an American boy, Eliot and that of his Bengali babysitter, Mrs Sen. The analysis of the short story is inducive, in that it focuses on the images of the text as they gradually come to the reader’s imagination. It emerges that the representations of India and the West, i.e. United States in this short story, are antithetically built through the opposition of colour/non-colour, noise/silence, full/empty, hot/cold, covered/naked, and smell/odourlessness. Through Eliot’s unmasking point of view, these antitheses will prove the “accustomed earth”, the United States, to be as strange to him as to Mrs Sen; while Mrs Sen’s India will appear a warmer and more comfortable place, although far beyond their reach.

Minority Cosmopolitanism

The topography of literary production and consumption has been transformed as writers and texts travel, ethnic literature is taught and translated in multiple national venues, and writers’ locations, audiences, and subject matter resist ready alignment. he growing internationalization of ethnic literary production has produced a heterogeneous range of texts, which challenge the established boundaries of ethnic and world literature. Because they focus on minorities, these texts have been slow to win recognition as world literature even though they depict transnational movements and identifications that diverge from those in canonical ethnic narratives. I develop the analytic of minority cosmopolitanism to examine the ways in which these literary narratives of worlding contest contemporary economic and political processes of globalization and Eurocentric accounts of globality. This essay considers how the gendered figure of the diasporic citizen serves as a vehicle for minority cosmopolitanism in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies (1999).

Liminal Phases, Domestic Spaces:

A liminal space / phase is a dimension of in-betweens’ where two identities can co-exist. Objects and traditions brought from home countries into foreign domesticities strengthen cultural identities; however, they are also symptomatic of the mourning process that is a part of the re[1]homing process. In Interpreter of Maladies, Lahiri’s characters grow more accustomed to living in foreign dwellings, and learn to negotiate between the culture, food and traditions of their home and ‘host’ country’ Lahiri also explores the effects that personal conflicts have on hybrid domesticities.

Nicht die ganze Wahrheit by Dirk Kurbjuweit

Nicht die ganze Wahrheit by Dirk Kurbjuweit

A Sociostylistic Perspective on Negatives and the Disnarrated: Lahiri, Roy, Rushdie

The "disnarrated" (Gerald Prince) means textual elements that consider (in a negative or hypothetical mode) what did not happen but could have. The scope of the term is inconveniently wide at present, ranging from explicit denials to lengthy passages of imagined or otherwise hypothetical events. This essay seeks to clarify the concept by relating it to the pragmatic and rhetorical functions of negatives in language and literature. A statement of what could have happened but did not may often be rephrased as what should have happened but did not. Negatives reveal what is expected in a given situation and of a particular person or ethnic group. They thus render social and literary norms visible and subject to resistance, which makes them valuable for feminist and postcolonial criticism. Negatives do not record a neutrally observable reality but must be attributable to a narrative agent with her own set of cultural and individual norms. In Jhumpa Lahiri's bicultural story "Interpreter of Maladies", the descriptive focus inhering in (negative) phrases sometimes conflicts with the focalization indicated by contextual cues. Salman Rushdie frequently evokes the voice of local gossips but renders their narrative hypothetical by using negatives. This may be regarded as one way of standardizing the expectations of a multicultural readership. Both Rushdie and Arundhati Roy invite the reader to make certain kinds of inferences concerning the events only to disappoint them by switching to disnarration at a climactic juncture. In making the reader conscious of the cultural stereotypes guiding her inferencing, negatives and the disnarrated serve ethical and political ends. They direct the reader's attention to the discursive context of the text, urging her to read metonymically.

Encyclopedia of Asian-American literature

Asian Americans have been writing and publishing since the 19th century, but today the popularity and importance of Asian-American literature is greater than ever. Encyclopedia of Asian-American Literature, a comprehensive new encyclopedia, traces American writers whose roots are in all parts of Asia, including China, Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, and more. Coverage emphasizes works that are important in the high school and college literary canon, as well as the historically significant and the contemporary. The coverage includes: Carlos Bulosan; Donald Duk; Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton); Jessica Hagedorn; David Henry Hwang; Maxine Hong Kingston; Interpreter of Maladies; Gish Jen; Ha Jin; The Joy Luck Club; Jhumpa Lahiri; Chang-rae Lee; Bharati Mukherjee; Native Speaker; No-No Boy; Naomi Shihab Nye; John Okada; Cathy Song; Amy Tan; Waiting; and The Woman Warrior.