Diasporic Subjectivities: A Study of the Second-generation Immigrant in Hiromi Goto’s Chorous of Mushrooms

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (01) ◽  
pp. 128-139
Author(s):  
Nagendra Bahadur Bhandari
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Third Space ◽  
Host Culture ◽  
Cultural Negotiation ◽  
Generation Immigrant ◽  
Cultural Spaces

This article analyses the formation of the hybrid and multiple subjectivities of the second-generation immigrant Murasaki in Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms. In diaspora, Murasaki simultaneously vacillates in the cultural spaces of her homeland Japan and host land Canada. She follows cultural practices of both cultural spaces in her cultural negotiation in the diaspora. Her simultaneous vacillations in two cultural spaces render hybridity and multiplicities in her subjectivities that deconstruct bipolar notion of home and host culture. Moreover, her subjectivities involve in a constant process of formation and reformation undermining the notion of stability and consistency.Murasaki’s evolving subjectivity is analyzed through Stuart Hall’s notion of cultural identity and Homi Bhabha’s postulation of third space in this study.

scholarly journals The Cultural Negotiation: A Shift of Paradigm between First and Second Generation Immigrants in Lahiri’s The Namesake

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-98
Author(s):  
Nagendra Bahadur Bhandari
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Sense Of Belonging ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Host Culture ◽  
Cultural Negotiation ◽  
Second Generation Immigrants ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Cultural Spaces ◽  
First And Second Generation

Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake explores the cultural negotiation of first and second generation Indian immigrants in America. They oscillate between two cultural spaces i.e. Indian and American searching cultural identity. This study makes an attempt to analyze the paradigm shift between the first and second generations in their cultural negotiation. Their experience of identity crisis, the process of assimilation in the host culture, the deculturation and acculturation processes, the reactions to the discriminatory practices and sense of belonging are examined. They are analyzed by using the theoretical concepts of Hall’s cultural identity and Bhabha’s third space. The cultural negotiation experienced by these two generations in diasporic hybrid cultural space renders fluid and unstable cultural identity. However, the differing approaches adopted by these two generations in their cultural negotiation results in diverse experiences.

scholarly journals Reinventing Cultural Identities in Diaspora: A Mother-Daughter Dyad in Tan's Narratives

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 261-272
Author(s):  
Nagendra Bahadur Bhandari
Keyword(s):  
First Generation ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Third Space ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Chinese Immigrant ◽  
Two Cultures ◽  
Host Culture ◽  
Immigrant Mothers ◽  
Second Generation Immigrants

Immigrants suffer problematic cultural identities due to their bicultural allegiances to their host and native cultures. They can not be totally free from their ‘being’, the shared cultural and historical experiences. As a result, they follow their cultural practices of native country even in their diasporic existences. At the same time, they adopt and follow the cultural practices of the host country. In fact, they are living in the cultural third space simultaneously oscillating between two cultures. In such cultural in-between’s, the first generation and the second generation immigrants undergo different experience in diaspora. In this article, Chinese American writer Amy Tan’s two fictions namely The Joy Luck Club and The Bonesetter’s Daughter are analyzed focusing on cultural identities of second generation immigrants. The second generation in these narratives is the daughters of Chinese immigrant mothers. Their relationship with their mothers unfolds their simultaneous attraction and distraction to the both native and host culture. Consequently, their cultural identities remain unstable, blurred and in the processes of transformation in the cultural third space of diaspora.  

scholarly journals Cultural Identity of the First-Generation Immigrants in Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter and Lahiri’s The Namesake

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 55-64
Author(s):  
Nagendra Bahadur Bhandari
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Host Country ◽  
First Generation ◽  
Home Country ◽  
Third Space ◽  
Cultural Space ◽  
First Generation Immigrants ◽  
The Third ◽  
Cultural Negotiation ◽  
Cultural Spaces

This article examines the problematic cultural identity of the first-generation immigrants in Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter (2001) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003). The immigrant characters problematize their cultural identity by oscillating in the cultural spaces of their home country and the host country. They tend to adopt new cultural identity of their host country while sustaining the old one of their home country. As a result, they negotiate their cultural identity in the shared cultural space which Homi K Bhabha terms as the third space. While analyzing the third space of cultural encounter, I refer to homeland culture as the first and the host land culture as the second cultural space of immigrants. Negotiating in the third space of the diaspora, the immigrants embody fluid and dynamic cultural identities that go beyond the binary of the host and home country. The process of the cultural negotiation of the immigrants is analyzed in the critical frame of Stuart Hall’s cultural identity and Homi Bhabha’s third space in this article.

Contesting Familial Bonds: (Af)filiative Relationships in Pakistani Anglophone Writing

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (I) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Aroosa Kanwal
Keyword(s):  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Second Generation ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
Host Culture ◽  
Migrant Families ◽  
Familial Bonds ◽  
Pakistani Immigrants ◽  
Culture Of Origin ◽  
Pakistani Families

Following Edward Said’s theorization of filiation and affiliation, this paper maps transformative itineraries of second-generation Pakistani immigrants in Britain who negotiate their personal identities on the basis of choice and affiliation instead of filiation. I argue that, as a result of the changing relationships of migrant parents with their British-born children, either because of a clash between nostalgia for the culture of origin and the host culture, between racial discrimination or the changing social structures of multicultural Britain, familial bonds within Pakistani families in Britain are severely affected. In other words, public or “external debates” in the diaspora, that Ralph Grillo describes as migrants’ imagined cultural practices, interact with internal debates that occur within migrant families. Against this backdrop, I explore the tensions, informed by a filiation-affiliation dialectic, that exist between first and second generations and the way these affect the personal struggles of an embittered anglicized Asian second generation and dramatize the metaphorical birth of a subject outside the confines of the familial order.

scholarly journals Reinventing the Self: Cultural Negotiation of LuLing in Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 64-76
Author(s):  
Nagendra Bahadur Bhandari
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Culture ◽  
Third Space ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Self ◽  
Chinese Immigrant ◽  
Cultural Interaction ◽  
Host Culture ◽  
Homi Bhabha ◽  
Cultural Negotiation ◽  
Stuart Hall

 In Amy Tan’s The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Chinese American mother LuLing involves in the self-exploration vacillating between her home and host cultures. The Chinese immigrant LuLing cannot remain totally independent of her indigenous culture of her native country China. Consequently, she demonstrates residual of Chinese culture in her diasporic life. Moreover, she forces her American born daughter to follow the same which sometimes renders conflict in mother-daughter relation. However, she cannot resist the influences of the culture of host country in the United States. She follows certain practices of American cultures. At the same time, she manifests an ambivalent attitude to both cultures. In such cultural interaction, her subjectivity encompasses multiplicities and pluralities by deconstructing the binary of the home and host culture. In this article, the formation of her subjectivity is analyzed through the critical postulations of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ of Stuart Hall and ‘third space’ of Homi Bhabha. Hall’s representation in Bhabha’s third space can be interpreted and analyzed in the light of Arjun Appadurai’s modernity of cultural globalization. Precisely, the cultural interaction in the third space of the diaspora renders fluid and unstable subjectivity of LuLing which simultaneously belongs to past, present and future.

scholarly journals Young South Africans and cultural (mal)practice: Breaking the silence in recent writing

Literator ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johan U. Jacobs
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Third Space ◽  
Forced Marriage ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Multicultural Context ◽  
Modern Identity

This article considered the literary representation of young South Africans coming of age within a post-apartheid, multicultural context and forging for themselves a modern identity across a divide between, and also within, cultures. They identify themselves with the global West, but also subscribe to indigenous African values, whilst recognising how they themselves have been damaged by corrupted cultural practices. Postcolonial theories of identity-formation – Said’s argument that post-imperial cultures are all hybrid and heterogeneous, Bhabha’s interstitial ‘third space’ where postcolonial identities are produced through processes of negotiation and translation, Hall’s theory that cultural identity is based on differences and discontinuities rather than on fixed essences, De Kock’s notion of a ‘cultural seam’ or site where cultures both differ and converge and difference and sameness are sutured together, Nuttall’s notion of entanglement, and Clingman’s theory of the transitive self – are used for understanding how young South Africans are shown in recent writing as having been shaped by traditional cultural practices and also damaged by cultural malpractices. Texts chosen for discussion are Adam Ashforth’s Madumo, about witchcraft, Russell Kaschula’s short story,‘Six teaspoons of sweetness’ and Gcina Mhlope’s short story, ‘Nokulunga’s wedding’, both of which deal with ukuthwala [forced marriage abduction] and, finally, Thando Mgqolozana’s novel, A man who is not a man, which deals with the consequences of a botched traditional circumcision. The article argued that self-reflexive critical and imaginative engagement by young people with the cultures that have formed – and deformed – them is a mark of the true coming-of-age of postcolonial and post-apartheid writing.

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