Racial And Gendered In/Visibility: Reading Jhumpa Lahiri's Fiction As A Response To The Objectification Of The Diasporic Subject In The West
| dc.contributor.author | Pourya Asl, Moussa | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2019-04-12T01:54:24Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2019-04-12T01:54:24Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2018-06 | |
| dc.description.abstract | The Indian diaspora writer Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction has been the subject of abundant yet controversial criticism. Whereas some acknowledge her truthful representations of diaspora experience, others have charged her with a limited vision that encourages, legitimizes and transmits only one favored reality. This research aims to investigate whether her fiction adheres to or deviates from prevailing racial and gendered hierarchies of the mainstream. To fulfill this underlying aim, the study offers a new interpretive model that seeks to evince the political, cultural and affective consequences of Lahiri’s diasporic writings and their particular enunciations of the literary gaze. A rapprochement between the two seemingly divergent psychoanalytic and the historicist theories of the gaze is proposed to explore the ways her fiction operates as both a record of and a participant in the social, sexual and political milieu of the post-1960s America, a span of time her fiction is both produced and situated. A diachronic examination of Lahiri’s oeuvre reveals that nearly all the narratives comprise an optical mechanism that shapes domains of visibility and invisibility, foregrounding and privileging some objects while bedimming and de-privileging others. The (immigrant) female character’s otherness, monstrosity and pathology is in her imprudently taking the role of spectator, which is conventionally the privilege of the (white) masculine. The specific focus on the analytics of panopticism also unravels the way her fiction acts as a micro‐governmental tool to promote the need to assimilate into the mainstream rubrics and not to complicate things through dogged persistence on cultural ruptures between the old and the new world. It is concluded that far from writing in favor of individuality—i.e., racial and gender sympathy—Lahiri’s fiction extols the nation-state in its role as the transnational regulatory apparatus of neoliberalism. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/123456789/7969 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Universiti Sains Malaysia | en_US |
| dc.subject | Reading jhumpa lahiri's fiction | en_US |
| dc.subject | the diasporic subject in the west | en_US |
| dc.title | Racial And Gendered In/Visibility: Reading Jhumpa Lahiri's Fiction As A Response To The Objectification Of The Diasporic Subject In The West | en_US |
| dc.type | Thesis | en_US |
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