SHAKY GROUND AND NEW TERRITORIALITIES IN BRICK LANE BY MONICA ALI AND THE NAMESAKE BY JHUMPA LAHIRI

Abstract

In this article I propose to analyse the way Brick Lane and The Namesake envisage the consequences of the new world geography on the psyche of migrants. Interestingly these two novels of the Indian diaspora envisage immigration as empowering, but they also pinpoint the difficulties of the interstitial self of the immigrant: its unsettling in‐betweenness verging on schizophrenia and what Julia Kristeva has termed “the silence of the polyglot” (Strangers to Ourselves, New York: Columbia UP, 1991: 16).

Keywords:

• identity
• Indian diaspora
• imagined communities
• new world geography
• contemporary psyche

Notes

1 Monica Ali was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and grew up in England where she still lives. Brick Lane is her first novel.

2 Jhumpa Lahiri was born in 1967 in London and raised in Rhode Island. She now lives in New York. Her collection of short stories The Interpreter of Maladies (1999) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

3 Ironically, Gogol is named after the Russian writer; this can be interpreted as a way of asserting imaginary identities over real ones.

4 This expression is used by Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things to refer to the subaltern’s lack of bearings.

5 Kristeva contends that this is how all identity is formed and not only that of immigrants. My contention is that the interstiality of migrants heightens the experience of in‐betweenness and somehow pushes it to its radical point.

6 Different categories of migrants can be distinguished. Nazneen and Hasina are part of what Appadurai calls the diaspora of hope. But there are also migrants whose situations are even worse, those who are part of the diaspora of despair or the diaspora of terror (Appadurai 6).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Françoise Kral

Françoise Kral is Senior Lecturer at the University of Paris X Nanterre. Since completing a doctoral dissertation in Australian literature she has published articles on the representation of settlers and natives in Australian literature, and on the writers of the Indian Diaspora, as well as on Albert Wendt and Matthew Kneale. She has edited a collection of essays entitled Re‐presenting Otherness: Mapping the Colonial Self, Mapping the Indigenous Other in the Literatures of Australia and New Zealand (2005). She is currently researching interstitial identities in contemporary literatures in English.