"Cultural Identity and Diaspora." Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake

Abstract

When Lahiri was two years old, her parents decided to go to the United States, thus she was born in London to Indian parents. As an immigrant child, I felt enormous pressure to be two things: loyal to the old world and fluent in the new, accepted on both sides of the hyphen. Like many other immigrant kids, I felt this strong strain to be loyal to the old world and fluent in the new. Looking back, this seems to be the norm. It seemed to me at the time that "I couldn't connect the dots between two worlds that had nothing to do with each other" (My Two Lives, 2006). Reading Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake through the lens of Stuart Hall's article on "Cultural Identity and Diaspora" is the goal of this study. In the first paragraph of his article, Hall argues that identity is not as simple and straightforward as we believe it is. Instead of seeing identity as a finished object, we should see it as a work in progress, one that is constantly shaped by, and never separate from, representation. The term "cultural identity" is defined by Hall as a process of "becoming" and "being" (Hall, qtd in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, 1993: 394). It is as much a part of the future as it is the past that defines our cultural identity. Not anything that already exists, regardless of time, location or history.