Eleventh Global Studies Conference

Abstract

Mukherjee’s critical discourse on diaspora is highly vibrant and marked by violent expression of this ambivalence of the split self. It is not a mere transference of textual spaces. The writer creates a counter-discourse that is at once geographical, spatial, and differential. The subjective centre is contested in a critical juncture when the immigrant is rooted in a nostalgic and remembered experience. Mukherjee’s postmodern concern for diasporic parenthesis of location, dislocation, and re-location is largely propelled by postcolonial environment of mass migration and disjuncture. In a condition of global anthropological necessity no human society has been able to avoid either immigration or dislocation and consequently none has been able to avoid multiculturalism. Since the late 19th century and most of the 20th century, voluntary migrants to metropolitan cities along with the second and third generations of the early migrants have formed a part of the existing diaspora. This global movement has led to the emergence of a new narration of travel, dislocation, displacement, and uprooting. This paper explores how, in her fiction, Mukherjee shows how the individual responds to multiculturalism in various ways through withdrawal or involvement, submission or assimilation, or through short circuiting memory or by hardening of identity constructs. Mukherjee’s expatriates are largely the creatures of loss, living a life of cultural depletion, and estrangement, dwindling in the polyphony of global identity. Mukherjee precisely details the insurgencies and manipulations of these borderline subjectivities between ‘melting pot’ and ‘cultural mosaic.’ ambivalence, split self, counter-discourse, spatial difference, disjuncture, mass migration, displacement, multiculturalism