scholarly journals "But you're Indian!" Cultural Hybridity and Assimilation in The Namesake

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sura Mohammad Khrais
Keyword(s):  
Personal Growth ◽  
Western Society ◽  
Cultural Hybridity ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Indian Culture ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Cultural Challenges ◽  
Homi Bhabha ◽  
Jhumpa Lahiri

This paper is a study of the cultural struggle and conflict survived by the protagonists in The Namesake (2003) by Jhumpa Lahiri as they move from their native land to America. It is an application of the theoretical concepts of hybridity and assimilation, as discussed in post-colonial criticism by critics such as Homi Bhabha. The researcher will discuss how the three main characters finally manage to develop new anti-monolithic models of cultural growth and exchange. As a result, they succeed in embracing a new culture while protecting their Bengali heritage. The novel depicts the life of an Indian couple (Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli) who settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1968. It describes the cultural challenges the heroine faces as she struggles to accommodate to a new Western society. Ashima clings tightly to her Bengali roots and identity, a fact which becomes apparent through the dilemma caused over naming their first baby. However, to survive the challenges of Massachusetts' society, Ashima welcomes its culture to a certain extent. Thus, she succeeds in overcoming feelings of loneliness and displacement. On the other hand, Ashoke's adjustment is less complicated. Although he copes with the new Western life faster, his respect for his native traditions is daily observed. His resentment of his children's attempt to give up their native identity is heartbreaking. Early in the novel, Gogol rejects symbols of his Indian culture, and later he repudiates his parents' style of life. Finally and after his father's death, Gogol's personal growth is associated not only with him welcoming his native culture, but also embracing both cultures in an excellent example of cultural hybridity.

scholarly journals Muslim Romance in Diaspora: Leila Aboulela’s “Minaret” (2005) and the Ethics of Reading in the West

2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (1-2 (6)) ◽  
pp. 243-248
Author(s):  
John A. Stotesbury
Keyword(s):  
Critical Reception ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Western Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Ethics Of Reading ◽  
Main Components

The inclination of theorizing literary works published in the Diaspora and in the post-colonial period, that has been observed recently tends to turn the investigation of the main components of literary works into a side task. Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela’s work can be considered one of the examples of such pieces of work. The novel is based on existential alternatives which are experienced by Sudanese women living with Muslim values in western society. The ambiguous norms in the Minaret by Aboulela are examined in the light of Andrew Gibson’s critical reception and receptivity.

Jhumpa Lahiri’s World of Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Pratima Shah
Keyword(s):  
Indian Culture ◽  
The Real ◽  
Foreign Countries ◽  
Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri is one of the most dynamic and enthusiastic writers among her contemporaries, She is definitely blessed with rare kind of art which she has achieved by virtue of her incessant labour and courage. Although she was born and brought up in the foreign countries, her attachment with India and the Indians became indispensable, which can easily be noticed all through her work. Lahiri subsequently developed her own technicalities, which she deployed in her fictional works. She is heartily associated with Indian culture and traditions, and this is the real cause for her huge popularity and fame.  

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
English Language ◽  
Book History ◽  
World Order ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of

Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.

scholarly journals Biomedical knowledge in Mexico during the Cold War and its impact in pictorial representations of Homo sapiens and racial hierarchies

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 219-244
Author(s):  
Erica Torrens
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Biomedical Knowledge ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Race And Racialization ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Pictorial Representations ◽  
Racial Hierarchies

Abstract This paper provides an overview of the state of Mexican genetics and biomedical knowledge during the second half of the twentieth century, as well as its impact on the visual representation of human groups and racial hierarchies, based on social studies of scientific imaging and visualization (SIV) and theoretical concepts and methods. It also addresses the genealogy and shifts of the concept of race and racialization of Mexican bodies, concluding with the novel visual culture that resulted from genetic knowledge merged with the racist phenomenon in the second half of the twentieth century in Mexico.

Divi pirmās personas stāstījumi Osvalda Zebra romānā „Māra”

2021 ◽  
pp. 197-208
Author(s):  
Daiga Zirnīte
Keyword(s):  
Young Woman ◽  
Personal Growth ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Other ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
First Person ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Growth Path ◽  
Dramatic Structure

The aim of the study is to define how and to what effect the first-person narrative form is used in Oswald Zebris’s novel “Māra” (2019) and how the other elements of the narrative support it. The analysis of the novel employs both semiotic and narratological ideas, paying in-depth attention to those elements of the novel’s structure that can help the reader understand the growth path and power of the heroine Māra, a 16-year-old young woman entangled in external and internal conflict. As the novel is predominantly written from the title character’s point of view, as she is the first-person narrator in 12 of the 16 chapters of the novel, the article reveals the principle of chapter arrangement, the meaning of the second first-person narrator (in four novel chapters) and the main points of the dramatic structure of the story. Although in interviews after the publication of the novel, the author Zebris has emphasised that he has written the novel about a brave girl who at her 16 years is ready to make the decisions necessary for her personal growth, her open, candid, and emotionally narrated narrative creates inner resistance in readers, especially the heroine’s peers, and therefore makes it difficult to observe and appreciate her courage and the positive metamorphosis in the dense narrative of the heroine’s feelings, impressions, memories, imaginary scenes, various impulses and comments on the action. It can be explained by the form of narration that requires the reader to identify with the narrator; however, it is cumbersome if the narrator’s motives, details, and emotions, expressed openly and honestly, are unacceptable, incomprehensible, or somehow exaggerated.

“An Indigenous Sovereignty of the Imagination”: Reenvisioning the Great Australian Novel in Alexis Wright's Carpenteria

Genre ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-219
Author(s):  
Liz Shek-Noble
Keyword(s):  
Third Space ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mutual Understanding ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Women Novelists ◽  
Homi Bhabha ◽  
White Settler ◽  
The One

Alexis Wright's second novel, Carpentaria, received critical acclaim upon its publication by Giramondo in 2006. As the recipient of the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2007, Carpentaria cemented Wright's position as the country's foremost Indigenous novelist. This article places Carpentaria within contemporary discussions of “big, ambitious novels” by contemporary women novelists by examining the ways the novel simultaneously invites and resists its inclusion into an established canon of “great Australian novels” (GANs). While critics have been quick to celebrate the formal innovations of Carpentaria as what makes it worthy of GAN status, the novel nevertheless opposes the integrationist and homogenizing myths that accompany canonization. Therefore, the article finds that Wright's vision of a future Australia involves moments of antagonism and mutual understanding between white settler and Indigenous communities. This article uses the work of Homi Bhabha to argue that Carpentaria demonstrates the emergence of a third space wherein negotiation between these two cultures produces knowledge that is “new, neither the one nor the other.” In so doing, Wright shows the resilience of Indigenous knowledge even as it is subject to transformation upon contact with contradictory ideological and epistemological frameworks.

scholarly journals Diasporic Consciousness and Identity Trauma in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 88-97
Author(s):  
Himadri Shyam
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Salman Rushdie ◽  
Bharati Mukherjee ◽  
Topical Issue ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Second Generation Immigrants ◽  
Jhumpa Lahiri ◽  
Contemporary Study ◽  
Recurrent Theme

In the contemporary era, immigration, exile and expatriation are related to home, identity, nostalgia, memory and isolation. These are the recurrent theme in the diasporic writings of the post-colonial writers like V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri and so on. Identity is a topical issue in the contemporary study of culture with many ramifications for the study of ethnicity, class, gender, race, sexuality and subcultures. It becomes an issue when something assumed to be fixed, coherent, and stable is displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty. When a period of uncertainty and confusion upsets a person’s identity, it becomes insecure, usually due to a change in the expected aims or role in society. This identity trauma brings a sense of longing and loss as seen in Lahiri’s stories.  The present article focuses on the first generation and second generation immigrants adherence to the old and new land as can be found in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. Lahiri represents her characters struggling to balance the two worlds that involve the issues of immigration, race, class, and culture. 

scholarly journals Nicholas Urfe’s Masculine Trap or the Construction of Manhood, its Ambivalences and Limitations in John Fowles’s The Magus

2017 ◽  
pp. 73-86
Author(s):  
Irina Strout
Keyword(s):  
Western Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
John Fowles ◽  
Lone Wolf ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Power And Control ◽  
Male Power ◽  
Personal Level ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
And Control

Western society and its fiction faces the overwhelming problem of masculinity and its modeling. The era of war, capitalism, the challenges of feminism affect the ideology within which men are constructed both as individuals and as a social group. John Fowles’s fi ction tackles the crucial issue of male power and control as masculinity is put to test and trial in his 1965 novel The Magus. The defi nition of manhood, male virility and social respectability of the period shape the 20th century male characters in Fowles’s fi ction. This paper aims to explore how John Fowles investigates the role of masculinity and power myths on the personal level of relationship and a wider scale of war and capitalism in The Magus. Notions of masculinity off er the protagonist, Nicholas Urfe, a sense of a superiority and power over women in the course of the novel. Among the goals of the project is to examine the mythical journey of Nicholas, which becomes a testing ground of his masculinity and maturity, as well his trial and ‘disintoxication,’ which is intended to help him to reevaluate his life and his relationships with women. One of the issues posed is whether Nicholas Urfe is reborn as a new man at the end of his search for redemption or if he remains the same egotistic, ‘lone wolf’ as he appears in the beginning of the novel.

scholarly journals CITRA EKSOTIK DALAM NOVEL RONGGENG DUKUH PARUK

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Abu Bakar Ramadhan Muhamad
Keyword(s):  
Power Relationship ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The West ◽  
Aesthetic Object ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
World Region ◽  
East Region ◽  
Rearrangement Process ◽  
Ambivalent Relationship ◽  
Material Conditions

Imaging of a discourse in the paradigm of postcolonialism is closely related to the issue of domination and subordination in terms of reference to imperialism or capitalization. The imagery is a project that develops special perceptions about "foreign" (East) regions. This project presupposes that the "foreign" (East) region is exotic "uncivilized" regions, standardized in a special "understanding", whose main purpose is to separate or dissolve it ("tame" the "foreign" region), so that different from or being "civilized". One area that is strongly embedded in this project is literature, with the novel as an aesthetic object. In connection with this issue, this article reveals how the East is presented in its exotic image, so how the image represents an ambivalent relationship between the East (colonized) and the West (invaders), especially in the Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk (RDP) novel by Ahamad Tohari.The results of the study show that the RDP novel is an urgent medium related to the conditions of postcoloniality. The postcoloniality is meant not only that the narrative that is displayed is the essence of what is obtained from the author about the exotic world region (the nature of Paruk dukuh) with all the signs attached to it, narration is also used as an affirmation of identity and historical existence, in the context of civilized culture. The culture in question is the source of identity that is championed as a filter and lifter, for the community that has been known and thought about, as an invitation for emancipation. Power and ability to tell stories, in this case, are used as weapons of the author in hopes of inspiring readers. The expected result is the hegemonic reader of the discourse displayed in the work of the author.In the post-colonial context, this method is inseparable from a combination where political and ideological power is interrelated, where the image represented is always still signifying the "emancipation" power relationship between the West and the East. However, like ideology, imaging must be realized other than as originating from and relating to material conditions and material effects, it is also a misrepresentation of reality and in its rearrangement process. Therefore, the potential, possibilities, and certain visions that follow, are full of content, values, or strategies for "mastering" (power). Especially in the Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk novel by Ahamad Tohari, exotic images give rise to ambivalent meanings for emancipation efforts (West to East).

scholarly journals Intermingling of History and Politics in The God of Small Things

2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 138
Author(s):  
Md. Abdul Momen Sarker ◽  
Md. Mominur Rahman
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Indian Culture ◽  
Arundhati Roy ◽  
Political Condition ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Democratic Election ◽  
Small Things ◽  
First Time

Suzanna Arundhati Roy is a post-modern sub-continental writer famous for her first novel The God of Small Things. This novel tells us the story of Ammu who is the mother of Rahel and Estha. Through the story of Ammu, the novel depicts the socio-political condition of Kerala from the late 1960s and early 1990s. The novel is about Indian culture and Hinduism is the main religion of India. One of the protagonists of this novel, Velutha, is from a low-caste community representing the dalit caste. Apart from those, between the late 1960s and early 1990s, a lot of movements took place in the history of Kerala. The Naxalites Movement is imperative amid them. Kerala is the place where communism was established for the first time in the history of the world through democratic election. Some vital issues of feminism have been brought into focus through the portrayal of the character, Ammu. In a word, this paper tends to show how Arundhati Roy has successfully manifested the multifarious as well as simultaneous influences of politics in the context of history and how those affected the lives of the marginalized. Overall, it would minutely show how historical incidents and political ups and downs go hand in hand during the political upheavals of a state.

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