BUTELER MARIA JOSE
Congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
Unaccustomed Earth: Striking roots in new lands
Autor/es:
MARIA JOSE BUTELER
Lugar:
Córdoba
Reunión:
Conferencia; XXXV FAAPI Conference:EFL and ART; 2010
Institución organizadora:
FAAPI
Resumen:

Unaccustomed Earth: striking roots in new lands

Jhumpa Lahiri writes about the Indian immigrants in America and about the lives of first generation Bengalis and their alienated children; her characters fight between voluntary exile from two countries and two cultures. Jhumpa Lahiri chooses to introduce her latest collection of short stories Unaccustomed Earth (2008) with an epigraph drawn from Hawthorne?s The Scarlet Letter:

 

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato, if it planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil. My children have other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control, shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth. (?The Custom House?)

 

Hawthorne?s epigraph serves as a unifying thread for the eight tales Lahiri sets to write about, and it functions as a metaphor of what it means to be an immigrant in America and the contradictions experimented in growing up with a divided or multiple nationality. The purpose of this paper is to explore how Lahiri celebrates the interculturality which results from the immigrant experience and how she sees it as leading to cultural enrichment. This first generation of Indian Americans succeed in establishing a dialogue between their culture of origin and the culture of the adopted country producing novel cultural forms and practices through the merging of two separate cultures. To discuss the issue of interculturality, I will first refer to the differences between multiculcuralism and interculturalism as presented by García Canclini in Culturas Híbridas. Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad (2001); then, I will refer to the postcolonial Indian experience by exploring the concepts of home and language as discussed by Madan Sarup in Identity and the Postmodern World (1996). Finally, I will refer to the experience of Indian immigrants and their first generation of children in the stories of the collection in general and in the title story in particular.