Towards and Across Third Cultures: South Asian American Transnationalisms and Rhizomatic Subjectivities in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Oeuvre

Year 2022, Issue: 56, 67 - 90, 01.11.2022

Carole Martin

Abstract

Physically and/or figuratively, Bengali American writer
Jhumpa Lahiri’s hybrid protagonists transcend national borders and
form dynamic subjectivities that resist simplified assumptions about
transnational migration. However, while some characters like to either
accentuate their ancestral South Asian heritage or endorse their assimilation to the United States, others rejoice in embracing third cultures or
embarking on unexpected journeys without fixed points, thereby questioning the restrictive container of the nation-state as the dominant category for examining society. Sustained by Homi K. Bhabha’s and Stuart Hall’s theoretical approaches to cultural identity and influenced by
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rhizomatic thinking, I will focus on
Lahiri’s autobiography and her fiction in English that portrays characters who, overexerted by the constraints of the two cultures wanting to
claim them, find refuge in a third culture or defy the nation-state completely by considering themselves citizens of the world, or nomads.

Keywords

South Asian American Literature, Transnationalism, Hybridity, Diaspora, Rhizome

References

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