Naming Jhumpa Lahiri Canons and Controversies

by Dhingra, Lavina; Cheung, Floyd

• ISBN13: 9780739169971
• ISBN10: 0739169971
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-12-30
• Publisher: Lexington Books

Summary

Jhumpa Lahiri is among the few contemporary writers being read widely by both mainstream and minority audiences, the general public and academic scholars, in the U.S. and globally.  While her works focus on specific ethnic experiences of highly educated, upper middle-class professional Bengalis and their children living in New England since the 1970s, they simultaneously address universal themes that consistently keep them on the New York Times bestseller lists, and that have made the film adaptation of her novel, The Namesake (2006), into a transnational phenomenon. Lahiri is also one of the first South Asian American writers to be included in the Heath Anthology of American Literature. Even though South Asian diasporic writers have won many prestigious international prizes, the meteoric success of Jhumpa Lahiri has raised new questions regarding her naming:  Is she a Bengali American writer? An Asian American writer?  An Indian writer?  An American writer?  A postcolonial writer?  Does what we name her matter? Does this naming determine whether, and how, and by whom Lahiri's texts are read and taught, and to which literary canons they belong? Why is Lahiri's writing so successful among multiple audiences, whether in Bengal, Boston, or beyond? Naming Jhumpa Lahiri: Canons and Controversies addresses these and other questions, and explains why naming matters, to whom, and how paying attention to these questions can deepen our appreciation for the politics surrounding Lahiri's works and our understanding of the literary texts themselves. This collection marks a significant evolution of the field of Asian American studies as it does not merely include scholars of South Asian descent writing about a South Asian writer in an ethnically confined context, but rather allows for intertextualities and conversations among scholars of varied ethnicities and fields including postcolonial, popular culture, psychoanalytic, film, women's, American, and world literature studies.

Author Biography

Lavina Dhingra is professor of English at Bates College and served as faculty associate dean of admissions from 2006 to 2009. She is the contributing coeditor of A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America (1998) and is completing a manuscript on South Asian American women's literature. Floyd Cheung is associate professor of English and of American studies at Smith College. He is also a member of the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Certificate Program, for which he served as the founding chair. Cheung is the editor of H. T. Tsiang's novels And China Has Hands (2003) and The Hanging on Union Square (2012) and is a contributing coeditor of Recovered Legacies: Authority and Identity in Early Asian American Literature (2005).

Table of Contents

Introduction Naming Jhumpa Lahiri: Bengali, Asian American, Postcolonial, Universal?	p. vii
The Ethnic, The Orientalist, And/Or The Universal?
Mediating the Particular and the General:Ethnicity and Intertextuality in Jhumpa	p. 1
The Inheritance of Postcolonial Loss, Asian American Melancholia, and Strategies of Compensation in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake	p. 27
What Lies Beneath: Lahiri's Brand of Desirable Difference in Unaccustomed Earth	p. 51
Consuming Diaspora: Audience And Imaginary/Intimate Communities
Novel/Cinema/Photo: Intertextual Readings of The Namesake	p. 75
Affect, History, and the Ironies of Community and Solidarity in Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies	p. 97
Intimate Awakening: Jhumpa Lahiri, Diasporic Loss, and the Responsibility of the Interpreter	p. 117
Gendered Ruptures And Familial Belongings
Feminizing Men?: Moving Beyond Asian American Literary Gender Wars in Jhumpa Lahiri's Fiction	p. 135
Gendered (Be)Longing: First- and Second-Generation Migrants in the Works of Jhumpa Lahiri	p. 157
Re-Rooting Families: The Alter/Natal as the Central Dynamic of Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth	p. 181
Index	p. 211
About the Contributors	p. 219
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