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Re-imagining Transnational Identities in Norma

Cantú's Canícula and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake
Binod Paudyal
Utah State University

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 RE-IMAGINING TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITIES IN NORMA CANTÚ‟S

CANÍCULA AND JHUMPA LAHIRI‟S THE NAMESAKE

by

Binod Paudyal

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

of

MASTER OF ARTS

in

American Studies

Approved:

_________________ _________________
Shane Graham Melody Graulich
Major Professor Committee Member

__________________ ________________
David Goetze Byron R. Burnham
Committee Member Dean of Graduate Studies

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY

Logan, Utah

2010
 ii

Copyright © Binod Paudyal 2010

All Rights Reserved

 iii

ABSTRACT

Re-imagining Transnational Identities in Norma Cantú‟s Canícula and

Jhumpa Lahiri‟s The Namesake

by

Binod Paudyal, Master of Arts

Utah State University, 2010

Major Professor: Dr. Shane Graham

Department: English

This thesis examines Norma Cantú‟s Canícula and Jhumpa Lahiri‟s The

Namesake from the framework of transnationalism characterized by migration,

transculturation, and hybridity. With the application of postcolonial theories, related to

identity and space, it identifies the space between different cultural and national borders,

as liminal space in which the immigrant characters diverge and intersect, ultimately

constituting a form of hybrid and transnational identities. While most immigrant writers

still explore the themes of complexities of lifestyles, cultural dislocation, and the conflicts

of assimilation, and portray their characters as torn between respecting their family

traditions and an Americanized way of life, my reading of these two immigrant writers

goes beyond this conventional wisdom about the alienated postcolonial subject. Through

a comparative analysis of the major themes in Canícula and The Namesake that center on

issues of cultural and national border crossing, this thesis contends that Cantú and Lahiri

attempt to construct transnational identities for immigrants, while locating and stabilizing
 iv

them in the United States. Given the nature of the mobility of people and their cultures

across nations, both writers deterritorialize the definite national and cultural identities

suggesting that individuals cannot confine themselves within the narrow concept of

national and cultural boundaries in this globalized world. A comparison between the

transnational identity of the 1950s in Canícula and that of the 1970s through the twenty-

first century in The Namesake demonstrates that identities are becoming more

transnational and global due to the development of technologies, transportation, and

global connections between people. In this regard, this thesis attempts to offer a re-vision

of the contemporary United States not as a static and insular territory but a participant in

transnational relations.

(73 pages)
 v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This thesis could not have been completed without the assistance and support of

many people, although unfortunately it is impossible to name all of them here. Firstly, I

would like to express my deep gratitude to Dr. Shane Graham for taking on my project,

for being a mentor to me, for his time, and his insightful suggestions. Thanks are due to

Prof. Melody Graulich, who has been unfailingly supportive and a source of good advice

throughout my time in graduate school. To both Dr. Graham and Prof. Graulich, the time

I have spent in each of your classes has been instrumental in my growth with literary

studies. The other member of my thesis committee, Prof. David Goetze, has been

generous with his help and comments on my proposal and thesis, and Kerin Holt,

although not on my committee, helped me brainstorm the ideas throughout the proposal

and thesis writing process.

Special thanks go to Prof. Wilfred Samuels of The University of Utah, who

provided his precious time to discuss my project and showed me new ways of looking at

and analyzing literature that has been both challenging and rewarding. Thanks are due to

Charlene Hirschi, past director of Writing Center at USU, who helped edit my thesis at

the final stage and made a number of suggestions. To my lovely wife, Sunita, you have

stood by me, given the words of encouragement, listened to me stress late at night, and

been there for me whenever I needed you. You were always the push I needed to keep

going. Last but certainly not least, I thank my friends Stephen Macauley, Elizabeth

Benson, Jennifer Bateman, Jared Odd, and Darren Edwards for taking the time to talk and

inspiring me to research and write this thesis.

Binod Paudyal
 vi

CONTENTS

Page

ABSTRACT ………………………………………………………….. iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ………………………... v

CHAPTER

I. INTRODUCTION . . . ………………………………... 1

Who Am I? Re-imagining Identity . ..………… 1

Nation, Nationalism, and Transnationalism ….. 9
Formation of Transnational Identity: Third
Space as Platform for Transformation,
Hybridity, and Transculturation . . . . . . . . ….. 14

Identity . . . …………………………... 14
Cultural Transformation and the
Third Space . ……………………… 17

Chapter Outline . . . . . .………………………. 20

II. BORDERLAND AS A THIRD SPACE:

TRANSNATIONAL SENSIBILITIES IN
CANTÚ‟S CANÍCULA: SNAPSHOTS OF A
GIRLHOOD IN LA FRONTERA . . . . …………… 22

III. BETWEEN THE LINES: FORMATION OF

TRANSNATIONAL IDENTITIES IN JHUMPA
LAHIRI‟S THE NAMESAKE . . . . . . . . . .…………… 38

IV. CONCLUSION ………………………………………. 59

NOTES . . . . . . ……………………………………………… ….. … . 62

WORKS CITED …………………………………………………..... .. 63

 CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Who Am I? Re-imagining Identity

A few months ago I visited a Sinclair store to see my old friend Arjun, who had

come to the United States a few years ago through the Diversity Visa Lottery. i As I was

standing by the register, one white customer, a little angry, began to argue with Arjun. I

didn‟t quite understand the issue they were arguing over, but suddenly I heard the man

asking Arjun “where do you come from?” I found the question rude and taunting. When

the customer was gone, Arjun was quite frustrated and said to me, “You see, Binod,

people claim that the United States is the only country where all the people are treated

equally regardless of origin, race, and nationality. But in practice, there is still

discrimination. It is American imperialism.”

As I came back to my apartment, a wave of thoughts came into my mind. I could

not help but feel that something was hammering on my head. Why did that man ask

Arjun where he came from? Was he not happy to see immigrants in the United States?

What does he mean by „where he came from‟? Arjun had already become a citizen of the

United States one year before. Would that citizenship not define his identity as an

American? Was the man asking Arjun his native land, then?

This chain of questions induced me to contemplate James Clifford‟s question

about the “deterritorialization” of identity in the twenty-first century: “What does it

mean, at the end of the twentieth century, to speak . . . of a native land? What processes

rather than essence are involved in present experiences of cultural identity?” (The
 2

Predicament of Culture 275).ii Relating Clifford‟s point about the deterritorialization of

identity to Arjun‟s case, the struggle to grasp a transnational identity by the immigrants in

contemporary multicultural United States becomes an urgent issue.

Critics like Arjun Appadurai have suggested that the notions of nativeness and

native places have become very complex as more and more people identify themselves,

or are categorized, in reference to deterritorialized “homelands,” “cultures,” and “origins”

(34). To explain the better understanding of the global system and interconnectedness,

Appadurai coins the idea of „scapes‟.iii His concept of scapes indicates changing social,

territorial, and cultural reproduction of group identity where people regroup in new

locations and reconstruct their histories far from their place of origin (48). Like

Appadurai, Liisa H. Malkki, an anthropologist, argues that “there has emerged a new

awareness of the global social fact that, now more than perhaps ever before, people are

chronically mobile and routinely displaced, and invent homes and homelands in the

absence of territorial, national bases” (52). In fact, when people are no longer spatially

bound to a single place, a “woof of human motion” occurs and they “deal with the

realities of having to move or the fantasies of wanting to move” (Appadurai 34). Being

myself an immigrant in the United States, where I‟m mostly unable to tightly locate

myself in this new territory, I always have a sense of inhabiting imaginary homelands.

While I live in the present experiences of the American culture, I also inherit and practice

parts and parcels of my culture of origin. In this sense, I live in two countries and have

two homes—one corporeal, that is in the United States, and another an imaginary

homeland—thus I have become a “transmigrant” (Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 22). iv

 3

The United States has always been a hub for immigrants. Many people of

different walks of life are migrating to the United States from around the world. National

borders are fought over and redrawn materially as well as textually, further undermining

any sense of a stable location. Writers create cultural products emerging from evermore

shifting grounds and translocations. Although in such shifting ground “our identity is at

once plural and partial” and “sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures . . . . it is a

fertile territory to occupy for the writers” (Rushdie 15). Distance and boundaries are not

what they used to be, and “this is a time,” as Ulf Hannerz states, “when transnational

connections are becoming increasingly varied and pervasive, with large or small

implications for human life and culture” (237). In this context, the notion of space and

identity in immigrant writers‟ works has drawn the attention of many critics and has

become an imperative subject to explore. However, rarely have critics tried to find a

nexus between all the immigrant writers. They have largely overlooked a common

ground, a space upon which the immigrants share and create their transnational identities.

This thesis, then, attempts to answer my central question: to what extent do the

immigrant writers locate and stabilize the transnational identity in their works, and what

factors influence their involvement in the transcultural conversation between the host

cultures and the immigrant community? It is likely that the immigrants live in a land of

nowhere, resulting from their attempt to overcome cultural issues and negotiate diverse

racial identities. The conflict between rootedness, constituting a tie to their past, and

uprootedness, living in the present, disrupts their lives. Then what is the common meeting

ground between these worlds? Do contemporary immigrant writers still explore the

themes of dislocation, displacement, and uprootedness? Or do they attempt to negotiate

 4

the differences and form fluid identities in their works? As I will show, contemporary

immigrant writers no longer cling to the themes of dislocation, displacement, and

uprootedness. Because they are affected by the notions of globalization, and

transnationalism, they attempt to locate and stabilize their identities in the new territories.

I discuss the concept of identity and space vis-à-vis transnationalism—associated

with postcolonial concepts such as hybridity, transculturation, and migration. I use Homi

K. Bhabha‟s concept of “third space” as the common ground for negotiation and

transformation, which is neither assimilation nor otherness but represents the history of

coalition building and the transnational and cultural diasporic connection. I argue that the

contemporary immigrant writers are preoccupied with the notion of shifting identities and

create their identity as transnational in their works. I make my argument using Canícula

(1995) by the Mexican American writer Norma Cantú, and The Namesake (2003), by the

Indian American writer Jhumpa Lahiri. My focus is not on how immigrant writers create

their fixed identity where the hierarchy between the immigrants and the dominant culture

is still existent but on how the understanding of identity has been changed in their works.

Whereas most immigrant writers still explore the themes of complexities of lifestyles,

cultural dislocation, and the conflicts of assimilation, and portray their characters as torn

between respecting their family traditions and an Americanized way of life, my reading

of these two immigrant writers goes beyond this conventional wisdom about immigrant

experience, and I explore the Third Space where they create their identity as

transnational.

In fact, this study is pertinent to day-to-day lives of immigrants living in the

United States. For instance, my cousin Laxman has been living in Salt Lake City for five
 5

years and has Americanized his life style and loves to be called “Lax.” He feels

comfortable as he crosses the national and cultural border and Americanizes his without

losing the root. He seems to be in the process of a Nepalese-American cultural formation

that includes, as Lisa Lowe states, “practices that are partly inherited, partly modified, as

well as partly invented” (65). Such experiences also prompt us to reconsider the texts by

immigrant writers that focus more on dislocation, uprootedness, and alienation.

I wonder if these are the real feelings that many immigrants have. Of course,

they feel alienated and dislocated sometimes, but more importantly they are also affected

by globalization and are in the process of transforming their identities. Many people

think that globalization has erased the distinct national and cultural identity of the people.

In this regard, I would agree with Kwame Anthony Appiah‟s positive view on global

changes that the erasure of distinctions among certain cultures can be beneficial these

days, and global changes have less to do with people‟s cultural or national identity than

inventing new forms of difference: “whatever loss of difference there has been, they are

constantly inventing new forms of identities: new hairstyles, new slang, and even, from

time to time, new religions. No one could say that the world‟s villages are becoming

anything like the same” (2).

These positive views on global flows and the transformation of cultural and

national identities are perceptible in both Cantú‟s Canícula and Lahiri‟s The Namesake.

Cantú stresses the flow of people coming and going on the borderland that blurs the

national boundary and suggests hybrid and transnational identities. Similarly, Lahiri

emphasizes not only the immigrants who leave somewhere called home to make a new

home in the United States but also the endless process of comings and goings that create
 6

familial, cultural, linguistic and economic ties across national borders. Her characters live

in-between, straddling two worlds, making their identity transnational.

Although Canícula was written in 1995 and The Namesake in 2003, a difference

of eight years, and both texts share similar concerns with the issues and events that are

shaping the contemporary multicultural United States of America, the texts differ in

historical setting and their contexts. The Namesake is set against the backdrop of the

1970s and 1980s when Indian migration to the West (here particularly the United States)

was rampant due to the effect of rising globalization. It explores the conflicts of Indian

immigrants for both the first and second generation, spanning a time period of late 1960s

to early twenty-first century. In this regard, The Namesake fairly deals with the cultural

conflicts that resulted from 1970s‟ globalization. The characters in the novel come from

across the ocean. The development of new technologies and transportation play a vital

role in mobilizing people from one world to another and in negotiations between different

cultures. Here the connection between different peoples, ideas and ideologies are faster.

In Canícula too we find movements of people from one place to another. It is

written against the backdrop of the 1950s, when a stretch of Texas to the United States

was still ongoing, causing back-and-forth movements of the people from both sides of the

border. Therefore, it is more of a result of the arbitrarily drawn borderline between

Mexico and the United States specifically due to the annexation of Texas to the United

States. This borderline divided the people and separated them from their own relatives

and loved ones, but could not stop the undercurrents of the flow of people from both

sides of the borders. Taking away one‟s territory does not limit the movements of people

and their cultures. Although the Mexican people in Texas were orchestrated to American
 7

identities, the deterritorialization of their identities becomes profound as they adapt and

survive their cultures in modified forms. They live physically in Texas, but emotionally

they also live in Mexico. Through these movements of the people that cross the

boundaries, Cantú reveals the transnational space on the borderland. Thus, by juxtaposing

these two texts, we learn that both technological change and the process of nation-

building affect the identity formation of immigrants and their descendents, paving a way

to transnational identity.

Although the approaches of the writers differ enormously, they nevertheless treat

the negotiation and propagation of identity similarly. Therefore, I study both from the

same framework of transnationalism characterized by migration and mobility in an

attempt to find a nexus between them in terms of hybrid and transnational identity

formation. In doing so, this study also shows how transnationalism is not a recent

phenomenon, but more importantly it is characterized by the mobility of people, ideas

and cultures. Transnational cultural exchange has accelerated in the modern era, which

can trace its origin to the ages of exploration and the slave trade. Wai Chee Dimock and

Paul Gilroy buttress this idea. Dimock argues that American literature “is better seen as a

crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of

other geographies, other languages and cultures” (3). Her discussion of Emerson‟s

indebtedness to the Bagavata Gita and Islamic scriptures illustrates how the United States

was connected to the rest of the world through the “deep time” that predates the era of

European colonial domination (3). Gilroy in The Black Atlantic (1993) addresses the idea

of a modern black internationalism. His analysis of Black Britons and of what he calls

“modern black political culture” provided one of the first treatments of black
 8

internationalism in the Western Hemisphere. Through his reading of Martin Delany‟s

Blake; or The Huts of America (1970), a story about a black slave in the United States

who escapes to Cuba and there begins a rebellion, Gilroy suggests an alternative vision of

what he calls an “intercultural” and transnational process of categorization:

. . . [Blake] locates the black Atlantic world in a webbed network, between

the local and global, challenges the coherence of all narrow nationalist

perspectives and points to the spurious invocation of ethnic particularity to

enforce them and to ensure the tidy flow of cultural output into neat

symmetrical units. I should add that this applies whether this impulse

comes from the oppressor or the oppressed. (29)

Gilroy‟s and Dimock‟s arguments add to my point that transnationalism is not

limited to any specific time period—it is all about networks and connection between

different people and ideas that challenge the narrow notions of national, racial, and ethnic

identities. While Gilroy suggests that transnationalism began with slavery, his argument

is particularly useful to clarify how the processes of intercultural relation and

transformation in Canícula and The Namesake are similar, and have evolved and changed

over time. Thus, despite the fact that Canícula represents a 1950s intercultural exchange

between the people of both sides of the border, where the involvement of technology was

very less apparent, and The Namesake represents the recent intercultural phenomena

along with the development of technology and transportation, the use of Dimock and

Gilroy contribute to overlap the time gap between both texts in terms of cultural

transformation.
 9

Nation, Nationalism, Transnationalism

In Imagined Communities: Reflections On The Origin and Spread of Nationalism

(1992), Benedict Anderson defines “the nation” as an “imagined community” (6).

According to him, this community is imagined because “the members of even the

smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear

of them, yet in minds of each other lives the image of their communion” (6). Therefore,

he believes nationalism is a particular form of ideological system which often represents

itself as a natural, spontaneously generated and fully developed world view uninfluenced

by history, economics, and politics. He notes that a sense of nationality has often been

expressed through the idioms of “kinship” or “home” and that “both idioms denote

something to which one is naturally tied” (143). The fact that one cannot choose to be

born in a particular country makes nationality “assimilated to skin-color, gender,

parentage, and birth-era” (143). Since these natural ties “are not chosen, they have about

them a halo of disinterestedness” which fashions the nation as an entity unaffected by

ideology (143). A nation is united by the ties of blood, language and culture— which are

believed to be the spontaneous expressions of some national essence—“regardless of the

actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each” (7).

It is undeniable that one of the essential human needs is the need of belonging to a

permanent group. Belonging to a particular permanent country allows one to eliminate or

minimize the feelings of loneliness. Bohdan Dziemidok believes, “the virtue of its

[nation‟s] form of satisfying the need of belonging is [. . .] like belonging to a family, it

imposes on us no requirement of fulfilling any condition, it requires from us no merits or

 10

achievement, and is given to us unconditionally” (86). Hence, the feeling of

belongingness to a national community shapes the national identity and national culture.

However, in the post-Renaissance period, the ideology of national formation based on the

unifying culture turned out to be imperialism. Similarly, later the newly emergent nation-

states in the post-Imperial era were motivated by European nationalism. It was the force

of nationalism that fuelled the growth of colonialism in the first place and anticolonial

movements in the latter. But the irony is that the construction of the post-colonial nation-

state is based on the European nationalist models. Modern nations are heterogeneously

constructed. So, it is inappropriate to say that a single common culture can create an

exclusive and homogeneous conception of national tradition. A national culture today is

represented as a hybrid of different voices of the people. In the post-Imperial era,

assimilation between different cultures is greatly made more difficult and intensified by

nationalism and the idea of nation-states.

It is true that “a nation-state is primarily a cultural community” (Dziemidok 84).

A common culture lies at the basis of ethnic and national identity unifying a given group.

Dziemidok admits that “both an ethnic community and a nation are collectivities which

are defined by relative identity and relative distinctiveness of their cultural properties”

(84). A contemplation on Dziemidok shows that a common national culture can be a

source of community or nation. However, there are negative consequences of nationalism

and national culture because “a culture is both a divisive and unifying force” (Huntington

28). Love for one‟s own nation and culture often turns into hatred towards another‟s

nation and culture.

 11

Since a nation is “an imagined political community” (Anderson 15), it is a “potent

site of control and domination within modern society” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin,

Key Concepts 150). Such nation formation cannot lessen the plight of the minorities and

the down-trodden. It only represents and consolidates the interests of the dominant power

groups. Thus, in the contemporary theory of nation and nationalism there exists the

political interest of the power groups. A nation cannot remain within the definite political

entity having internal heterogeneities and differences. So in this age of globalism and

modern diversity, our main concern should not be “whether we have nations but what

kind of nations we have, that is, whether they insist on an exclusionary myth of national

unity based in some abstraction such as race, religion or ethnic exclusivity or they

embrace plurality and multiculturalism” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Key Concepts

155).

The intensification of globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has

created growing awareness of the porosity of national boundaries and of the silence of

activities and relationships that take place across them. Anthropologists and other social

scientists have begun to focus on transnational ties which link individual or groups in one

or more nation states by transcending their national boundaries (Clifford, Routes 302). In

immigration research, this has involved studying activities that connect immigrants to

their countries of origin, their countries of settlement, and often to other emigrants from

their countries of origin who have settled elsewhere (Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 7). In

addition, in social science, transnationalism is viewed as a process of creating cultural

hybridity. But in this project, I combine the definitions given by anthropologists and

social scientists and define transnationalism as the phenomena of reaching across or

 12

extending beyond national boundaries, with a particular focus on the narrative and

cultural aspects of national bodies.

Transnationalism has been strongly linked to immigrants and hybridity, which are

fundamental in postcolonial studies. For instance, Pheng Cheah argues that “the

celebration of cultural differences and the anti-Eurocentrism that characterizes

postcolonial cultural studies . . . belong to a broader intellectual milieu” (290) and

“reclaim the term cosmopolitanism” (291). Like Bhabha, he invokes the terms

transnationalism and cosmopolitanism to assert the importance of hybridity to an

understanding of cultural contestation and political transformation in contemporary

globalization. The definition that Linda Basch, Nina Glick Schiller, and Christina

Szanton Blanc offer is relevant to support the cultural conditions that postcolonial

theorists have been delineating as hybridity or multiplicity of identities. They define

transnationalism as

the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social

relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. We call

these processes transnationalism to emphasize that many immigrants today

build social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders . . .

An essential element of transnationalism is the multiplicity of

involvements that transmigrants sustain in both home and host societies.

(7)

Thus, transnationalism is a process by which migrants, “through their daily activities and

social, economic, and political relations, create social fields that cross national

boundaries” (22). In fact, migrants live a complex existence that forces them to confront
 13

and rework different hegemonic constructions of identity developed in their home or new

nation state(s) and “reterritorialize their practices as well as their identities” (34). For

example, as Ashima and other Bengali immigrants in The Namesake feel deterritorialized

in the United States, they attempt to restructure the territory by starting to celebrate

Christian festivals in their own way. They celebrate Christmas and Thanksgivings the

way they would observe Hindu festivals like Dipawali and Durga Pooja. By doing so,

they integrate US cultures with their practices, creating a hybrid culture that crosses

national boundaries. In the following section, along with the definition of identity, I

briefly discuss the formation of transnational identity focusing on Bhabha‟s Third space

as a site where transformation takes place making the identities hybrid and transnational.
 14

Formation of Transnational Identity: Third Space as Platform for

Transformation, Hybridity, and Transculturation

Identity

Identity is a topical issue in the contemporary study of culture with many

ramifications for the study of ethnicity, class, gender, race, sexuality and subcultures.

Identity becomes an issue when something assumed to be fixed, coherent, and stable is

displaced by the experience of doubt and uncertainty. Identities are not something once

and for all; rather they are constantly producing themselves anew. Identity is associated

with desire—desire for recognition, association, and protection over time and space.

Identities are constructed under circumstances which are not chosen deliberately. In other

words, identities are perceived within the domain of cultural circumstances and are not

things which exist; they have no essential or universal qualities. They are constructed,

made rather than found, by representation. In Etienne Balibar‟s words, “identity is never

a peaceful acquisition: it is claimed as a guarantee against a threat of annihilation that can

be figured by another identity or by an erasing of identities” (186).

The expression of identity is inextricably bound up with the notion of culture.

Many scholars add that at the basis of ethnic and national identity there exists a common

culture. Bohdan Dziemidok uses the expression “national identity” and “cultural identity”

interchangeably because according to him national or ethnic identity is primarily a

cultural identity (84). Ross Poole also believes that “in almost all cases the emergence of

a sense of national identity coincided with a flourishing of national culture” (27). A

nation is primarily a cultural community, and the national culture provides the national
 15

community with its feel of continuity, which is an important factor in every type of

identity. Hence, it is reasonable to discuss every type of identity in relation to cultural

affiliation.

Stuart Hall argues that there are at least two different ways of thinking about

cultural identity. The first position defines cultural identity in terms of one shared culture,

a sort of collective one true self which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in

common. In particular, he uses the language of “purity” and “cultural origins” to

characterize this view of cultural identity. Within the terms of this definition, as Hall

argues, “our cultural identities reflect the common historical experiences and shared

cultural codes which provides, as one people, with stable, unchanging and continuous

frames of reference and meaning beneath the shifting divisions and vicissitudes of our

actual history” (“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 393). Hall‟s model of identity is

relevant to Anderson, who seems to believe in the existence of such origins as the basis

of nationalism. However, Hall rejects the essentialist notion of cultural identity in favor

of a view of identity as “a production,” something negotiated and imagined (392). Along

with the points of similarity, cultural identity also has the “critical points of deep and

significant difference, which constitute „what we really are‟ or rather . . . „what we have

become‟” (394). One can‟t speak for very long, with any exactness, about one

experience, one identity, without acknowledging its other side. Such is the second notion

of cultural identity Hall favors:

Cultural identity, in this second sense, is a matter of “becoming” as well as

being. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is something which

already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural

 16

identities come from somewhere, have histories. But like everything

which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. (“Cultural

Identity and Diaspora” 394)

Hall‟s argument clarifies that far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past,

identities are subject to the continuous play of history, culture, and power. Identities are

the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves

within, the narratives of the past. The ways in which these identities were subject and

positioned in the dominant regimes of representation were the effects of a critical

exercise of cultural power and normalization. The dominant or superior culture has the

power to influence or dominate the other.

Nevertheless, this idea of otherness as an inner essence changes our conception of

cultural identity. From this perspective Hall writes, “Cultural identity is not a fixed

essence at all, lying unchanged outside history and culture. It is not some universal and

transcendental spirit inside us on which history has made no fundamental mark”

(“Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 395). Thus, identity is neither once-and-for-all nor is it

a fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute return. But identity is not a

mere phantasm either. It is something that has histories or a past, which continually

speaks to us. For example, let us consider the shifting identities of black people in the

United States. Descendents of African ancestors were called Negro, meaning black, when

they were migrated to the United States. Later people began to call them Nigger, meaning

black slave. After the Emancipation Proclamation, they were called Black American, and

then Afro-American. Now they are called African American which shows the connection

to their past or histories. Identities of black people in the United States have constantly
 17

been reconfigured over time and space. This example also reveals the problematic nature

of national identities. For instance, Africa is not a country but a continent. Then why

don‟t we call people Nigerian-American, for example, instead of African-American?

Why don‟t we call people Nepalese-American rather than Asian-American? Or why

don‟t we simply call them American?

However, my larger point here is that identities are always in a process of

transformation despite the existence of hierarchy and domination of one culture over

another. If we analyze the example discussed above, we find transcultural engagement

between immigrant groups and dominant (host) societies opening up a Third Space where

hybrid identities are created, making neither this nor that but their own—not African or

simply American, but African American.

Cultural Transformation and the Third Space

Cultural transformation is a process specifically that takes place among

immigrants. In fact, immigration itself is a phenomenon, which takes place in a global

context. The connections between immigrants and their home countries, as well as the

political status of both home and host countries, affect the ways in which they adjust to a

new location. The interaction and engagement in transcultural conversation between the

host or dominant cultural groups and immigrant groups slowly opens up the new site for

transformation. As such, cultural transformation characterizes the in-between as a third

element, an amalgam of two cultural entities that create a third identity after the original

two have been altered. In this context, cultural transformation is related to Basch,

Schiller, and Blanc‟s concept of “social fields” and Bhabha‟s notion of third space.
 18

To address the notion of identity, Bhabha claims that „third space‟ is characterized

by “discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of

culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated,

translated, and rehistoricized anew” (37). That is, Third Space is a place where we

negotiate between different identities. Negotiation becomes a process where people of

different cultures accept and blend their cultures in a society without one culture

dominating the other. This co-existence of different cultures ultimately produces a hybrid

culture which Bhabha posits as “the „inter—the cutting edge of translation and

negotiation, the in-between space—that carries the burden of the meaning of culture”

(38). For Bhabha “the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original

moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity to me is the „Third Space,‟

which enables other positions to emerge” (qtd. in Rutherford 211).

The term hybridity, that for a long time carried a negative connotation of

impurity, which is most associated with people of mixed bloods, has found itself liberated

from taints of rejection in postcolonial debates. v For Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin,

hybridity is a phenomenon of “cross-culturality,” hence the delineation of the term

“syncreticism” that suggests the coming together of various cultures, talents, or ideas

(The Empire Writes Back 34). Hybridity is a dual culture and also implies a syncretic

view of the world in which the notion of fixity or essentiality of identity is continually

contested. The concept of hybridity dismantles the notion of heterogeneity, difference, an

inevitable hodge-podge. In other words, hybridity opens the door for cultural emergence.

Thus, hybridity is not just any given mixing of cultural materials, backgrounds or

identities. Rather, hybridity is related to what Joel Kuortti and Jopi Nyman call “a zone
 19

where people can meet, exchange ideas and form fluid identity” (16), and to Bhabha‟s

interstices where “the intersubjectivities and collective experiences of nationness,

community interest, or cultural values are negotiated” (2) without “an assumed or

imposed hierarchy” (4). Hybridity is the intercultural space of in-betweenness and

liminality where identity is formed through the negotiation between different cultures.

In fact Bhabha‟s notion of third space comes from his interest in the way in which

power and authority functioned in the symbolic and subjectifying discourses of the

colonial moment. His interest was particularly focused on the domain of cultural

relations, where the structure of signification or the regime of representation becomes at

once the medium of social discourse as well as the operative and substantial objective of

a political strategy.

Although Bhabha targets his idea of Third Space to stress the interdependency of

colonizer and colonized, it is pertinent to the situations of immigrants living in the United

States. In accepting this argument, we understand why claims to the inherent purity and

originality of cultures are untenable. It urges us to open up the notion of a transnational

culture “not based on exoticism or multi-culturalism of the diversity of cultures, but on

the inscription and articulation of culture's hybridity” (Bhabha 7). It is in this space that

immigrants can “find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Others.

And by exploring this „Third Space', we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as

the others of ourselves” (8). The hybridized nature of cultures steers us away from the

problematic binarisms that have until now framed our notions of culture. The context in

which I‟m using the concept of Third Space is different than the colonial context that

Bhabha has in mind. Today along with the technological development and excessive
 20

mobility of people that have intensified and changed the cultural exchange, the Third

Space has considerable implications for reinventing of a new United States, for example,

that reconcile and overcome the embeddedness of any existing hierarchies,

categorization, and discrimination. Therefore, the contemporary immigrant writers I‟m

analyzing in this thesis are attempting to create an alternative space to locate and stabilize

their characters in the new (thus, the word “alien” becomes inappropriate) land of

settlement.

Chapter Outline

In the following chapter, entitled “Borderland as a Third Space: Transnational

Sensibilities in Cantú‟s Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera,” I discuss the

concept of borderland as a Third Space that represents neither assimilation nor otherness

but the history of coalition building and the transnational and cultural diasporic

connection. I examine this argument in Canícula and show how Cantú , by blurring past

and present, fact and fiction, memory and imagination, and metaphorically collapsing the

borderline between the U.S. and Mexico, implies the reterritorialization of borderland as

a place of multiplicity of identities, a third space, which is located in migration,

breakdown of boundaries and hybridity.

In the third chapter called “Between the Lines: Transnationalism in Lahiri‟s The

Namesake,” I explore the in-between space that evokes the space of India‟s American

diaspora. I argue that by representing her characters at the crossroad where both local and

global spaces meet and constant negation between different aspects of lives appear,
 21

Lahiri depicts a transnational space for the Indian immigrants in the United States.

Although the immigrants‟ tenacity in clinging to the past is obvious in such space, a

constant negotiation between different identities, recasting the fixed identities is seen as

inevitable in The Namesake. I build the argument that although Lahiri represents her

characters struggling to balance the two worlds that involve the issues of immigration,

race, class and culture, she rejects and casts off India‟s Third World status as the Other

and validates Indian immigrants‟ presence in the United States.

Finally, I end this thesis by discussing briefly what we learn about

transnationalism, identity formation and cultural exchange by putting Cantú and Lahiri

side by side. While both Lahiri and Cantú astutely construct a transnational space on US

soil, they differ in their approach and method. A comparative study between these two

writers demonstrates that identities are becoming more transnational and global due to the

development of technologies and increased global connection between people, evolving

Bhabha‟s notion of Third Space into multiplicities of identities.

 CHAPTER II

BORDERLAND AS A THIRD SPACE: TRANSNATIONAL

SENSIBILITIES IN CANTÚ‟S CANÍCULA:

SNAPSHOTSOF A GIRLHOOD EN

LA FRONTERA

Though the borderland has been represented positively in recent academic theory,

still the diversity of definitions shows it is a reflection on how people project their desire

onto the idea of the border. In the case of the US-Mexico border region, both nations

project their fears and desires onto this liminal territory through deteriorating hybrid

identities: “When representation is transferred to the border, meaning and memories

become part of a distorted reality, a landscape filled with images related to fear, hybrid

identities, and sexual and racial tension” (Valesco 319). This stereotype of the

borderland as a place of chaos, sleaze, debauchery, and distrust, for example, can be seen

in Carlos Fuentes‟s The Old Gringo (1997). Fuentes‟s The Old Gringo can be read as

one of the best examples of contemporary perceptions of the US-Mexico border where

“the city‟s liminal and cultural hybrid space is transformed into a tale of the darkest

Mexico, a nightmare in which space is no longer neutral but rather charged with distrust

and racial meaning” (Valesco 319). However, in this chapter, I discuss the concept of

borderland as the Third Space that involves neither assimilation nor otherness but

represents the history of coalition building and the transnational and cultural diasporic

connection. I explore how in Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la frontera (Canícula

hereafter) Norma Elia Cantú, blurring past and present, fact and fiction, memory and
 23

imagination and, collapsing the borderline between the U.S. and Mexico, suggests the

“reterritorialization” of the borderland as a place of a multiplicity of identities, a third

space located in migration, the breakdown of boundaries and hybridity (Deleuze and

Guattari 80).

Canícula is a depiction of growing up on the border between Texas and Mexico.

In order to achieve maturity and form her border identity, Cantú erases the shadow lines

within—the lines that separate photos and text, reality from imagination, event from

memory, past from present and, metaphorically, Laredo from Nuevo Laredo. In contrast

to the stereotypes of the borderland, Cantú depicts it as a “safe place between two

countries,” where cultural pluralism or a rainbow coalition of cultures is constituted (2).

She presents a positive view of the “borderland where Mexico meets Texas” (2). It is that

“land in between that she calls la frontera, the land where her family has lived and died

for generations” (2).

Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt in their essay “On the Borders Between U.S.

Studies and Postcolonial Theory” express positive opinions about the borderland. They

define the term borderland in the context of cultural history to refer to “the construction

and mobilization of difference” (7). They argue that “borders is the best term available to

link the study of cultural differences internal to nation-states like the US to the study of

transnational or diasporic connections in the context of globalization” (7). Cantú‟s work

reflects the argument Singh and Schmidt associate with the borderland. Her focus on

negotiating geographical space, cultural connections, and a multiplicity of identities is

part and parcel of exploring the world of la frontera. Cantú recognizes that borders both

connect and divide people, where the clash of cultures and dangers are attached to them.
 24

She believes that la frontera is at once a “wound that will not heal” and a wound “forever

healing.” (Cantú, “Living on the Border” 1). Yet, she insists, “one must see border life in

the context of its joys, its continuous healing, and its celebration of a life and culture that

survives against all odds” (“Living on the Border” 1).

Written against the backdrop of the borderland between Mexico and Texas long

after the annexation of Texas into the United States in 1848, Canícula presents the

complexities and ambiguities of lives on the borderland. Within this historical context,

Cantú‟s description of the borderland suggests that it is almost impossible to confine

oneself within a narrowed concept of cultural, national, or ethnic boundary in this age of

diversity, migration, and interconnectedness of the modern world. In other words,

Canícula reflects what Carey McWilliams wrote almost fifty-eight years ago that “the

border between the United States and Mexico is one of the most unreal borders in the

world; it unites rather than separates peoples” (14). The border fence, created in 1848

“with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo . . . left 100,000 Mexican citizens

on this side [United States]” (Anzaldúa 7). The annexation separated the people from

their own relatives on the other side of the border. However, it also provoked the back-

and-forth movements of the people between Texas and Mexico that we see to this day.

Cantú‟s delineation of these movements of the people across borders makes their story

inseparable from the world of la frontera. In this regard, Cantú‟s view of the borderland

is similar to Gloria Anzaldúa‟s belief that the border culture is characterized by diversity

and heterogeneity. Although Anzaldúa, in her book Borderlands /La frontera, represents

the borderland as a place of discomfort, she also identifies the borderland cultures as

hybrid and transnational. Anzaldúa explores the border between the United States and
 25

Mexico as “una herida abierta, where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.

And before a scab forms hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form

a third country—a border culture” (3). The importance of Anzaldúa‟s argument in

Canícula is that the geographical boundary cannot prevent a third culture from emerging.

The narrator and her family continuously circulate through the US-Mexico borderlands

creating the emergence of new forms of identities and cultural affinities.

I have mentioned elsewhere Bhabha‟s argument that the hybridized nature of

culture vis-à-vis the exploration of the third space steers us away from the problematic

binaries and hierarchies that have until now framed our notion of cultural identities. For

this to happen, one has to go through certain changes and transformations. In Cantú‟s

Canícula, this transformation is reflected in the narrator and the families who resemble

ethnic minorities living on the borderland. When the borderline between Texas and

Mexico was drawn, the Mexican people, David Gutiérrez notes, “became doubly

marginalized as orphans of the Mexican nation and as internal outcasts within the newly

expanded United States” (485). However, while facing an atmosphere of cultural

hostility, these ethnic groups were “forced to devise defensive strategies of adaptation

and survival in an intermediate, „third‟ social space that [is] located in the interstices

between the dominant national and cultural systems of both US and Mexico” (Gutiérrez

488). Territorial encroachment created a growing awareness of mutual cultural affinities

based on shared cultural heritage among most ethnic Mexicans on both sides of the

border while also highlighting the necessity of adopting a multiplicity of identities.

Cantú‟s book represents the borderland between the United States and Mexico as

a third space where marginalized people (Chicana/o) forge new identities in reaction to,
 26

and often in opposition to, their marginalization. It is a dynamic site where, as Emma

Pérez states, “Chican/o history finds itself today, in a time lag between the colonial and

postcolonial,”-- an alternative space that blurs the limitations of boundaries and

engenders new possibilities for multiplicity of identities (6). Drawing upon Bhabha‟s

model of third space, Pérez talks about third space to “move beyond colonial history by

implementing the decolonial imaginary with a third space feminist critique to arrive

finally at postcoloniality, where postcolonial identities may surface” (125). She believes

that “the decolonial imaginary is that time lag between the colonial and postcolonial, that

interstitial space where differential politics and social dilemmas are negotiated” (6). Just

as Pérez emphasizes the fusion of diaspora and the border, Cantú seeks to create a space

in the complex world of la frontera, the in-between space that connects the United States

and Mexico.

Nena‟s life experiences at the age of fourteen represent the struggle and the

dilemma of people living in this complex region caught between two countries and

cultures. Cantú writes, “The stories of girlhood in that land in-between, la frontera, are

shared; her story and the stories of the people who lived that life with her is one”

(Canícula 2). Nena‟s connection with her “gringas” classmates and the obligations of her

culture affect the way she grows up and adjusts her identity in the borderland. Her small

decision to purchase “a pair of black leather flats with red, green, yellow, shiny

rhinestones just like Lydia‟s” is strictly objected to by her Papi who argues that “they‟re

shoes for a puta, not a decent girl” (61). The coming together of these different cultures

and ideas makes Nena‟s life complex and confused. To negotiate and overcome such

conflicts, Nena adopts multiple cultural practices in response to social dilemmas, opening
 27

up the new site for transformation. She wears “old scuffed oxblood red loafers and bobby

sox” to church and school and “the rhinestone flats defiantly in my quinceanera photo as

I sit in our front yard with friends and family all around” (61). In fact, Nena lives at the

crossroad where various cultures and people meet, dismantling the essentiality of national

and cultural identity and making border identities more fluid and hybrid.

Cantú suggests the fluidity of border identity through words of genre and blurred

narrative. A professor of English absolutely knowledgeable about the genre, Cantú

includes discrepancies between photos and texts to complicate her narrative. She hesitates

to claim any particular genre for the book: “I was calling the work fictional

autobiography, until a friend suggested that they really are ethnographic and so if it must

fit a genre, I guess it is fictional autoethnobiograhpy” (xi). At first when we see the

photos, we assume that the story of the book is a true story of a real person. The

photographs used in the books of Cantú and her family give a sense of veracity to the

story. However, the prose portion of the narrative contradicts the accompanying pictures.

In this sense, Cantú suggests that like the form of the book, the borderline is merely a

shadow line where one can see their own image on the other side of the border. There is

no such thing that separates people from their own shadows. Talking about the

relationship between the genre of the book and the borderland in an interview with

Timothy Dow Adams, Cantú says:

All I can answer is that my book is about memory and photos are one way

of „freezing‟ memories, just like words are one way of „freezing‟

thoughts—and yet both are tenuous and fleeting. We remember differently

from what the photo freezes and our words often don‟t quite
 28

express what we think/feel. I work with the ideas of memory and

writing—but all in a cultural context of the border which itself is fleeting

and fluid. (qtd. in Adams 66)

Cantú‟s statement illustrates that by complicating the genre of her book—a mix of

biography, ethnography, autobiography, fact and fiction—she is suggesting the fleeting

and hybridized nature of the border identity. This unique nature of borderland makes “a

culture forever in transition, changing visibly from year to year” (Cantú, “Living on

Border” 1). The story of Cantú and her family parallels the history of the Mexican people

living on this borderland who negotiate geographical space, cultural connection, and

individual identity.

Cantú‟s emphasis on maps and documents illustrates her attitude toward an

alternative, transnational space in the borderland. She begins her book with a hand-drawn

map in which the borderline that separates Mexico from the U.S. is hardly noticeable.

Compared with an official map, the borderline in this map is blurred and seems merely a

shadow line. It is not surprising that national identity forms in and through the documents

that define the nation. However, Cantú, by blurring factual and fictional documents,

questions and undermines the status of social truth and identity supposedly created by

these documents. It is true that documents as facts or archive play a crucial role in

constructing social reality and national identity. But such social reality is also subjective.

Derrida argues that the truth created by the archive is arbitrary. He defines the archive as

“a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons,

those who commanded. The citizens who thus held and signified political power were

considered to possess the right to make or to represent law” (2). Relating to Derrida‟s
 29

idea, the significance of Cantú‟s hand-drawn map is that the separation of the people

from their relatives in the borderland as a consequence of the official drawn boundary is

not the ultimate reality. It is artificially drawn by the people in power, thus the line cannot

separate Laredo from Nuevo Laredo. Rather, people on the borderland remain connected

despite such borders.

This arbitrariness of the document is further suggested through Cantú‟s falsely

defined identity through the official documents in the chapter called “Mexican Citizen.”

Although she signs the introduction of the book as “Norma Elia Cantú,” the name in the

official documents (passport) is fictional. In fact, Norma Cantú does not appear anywhere

within the pages of the text, but instead the name “Nena” is mentioned several times,

always identified with the first-person narrator. In one of the documents called “Media

Filiacion” in “Mexican Citizen,” “the photo of one-year-old, baldy” child is stapled with

the signature of Azucena Cantú in her official U.S. immigration paper (21). The skin

color of the person in the document is listed as “blacho,” or white, which contradicts

what the narrator tells us about herself. In another official document called “Faliacion” in

the same chapter, Cantú‟s photo is stapled to the document with a street address in

Laredo, Texas, though the document “claims that I am a Mexican citizen so I can travel

with Mamagrade into Mexico without my parents” (21). The document is in Spanish and

the official signature is “Azucena Cantú,” rather than Norma Cantú.

It is confusing yet significant that Cantú intentionally identifies herself as a citizen

of both the United States and Mexico. She is an American because the document is issued

by the US and lists her address in Laredo, Texas. She is a Mexican citizen because the

document claims so. Relating to the context of the annexation of Texas to the United
 30

States, one might argue that Cantú is reclaiming Texas as a part of Mexico that had been

seized by the United States in 1848, leaving thousands of Mexican people as minority or

immigrants in their own land. However, Cantú‟s concern is not to claim Texas as a part

of Mexico, but to suggest that the borderland does not belong to any particular country or

culture. It is characterized by the diversity of people, ideas and, cultures that connect

individuals between different worlds. Cantú‟s notion of the borderland as “the collusion

of a myriad of cultures” even complicates the idea of citizenship, and challenges the

frequently repeated question “where do you come from?” that I have described at the

beginning of the introductory chapter (Cantú, “Living on Border” 1). If we look closely at

the document, we can notice that the signature of “Azucena Cantú” is pasted over the

original signature “Norma Elia Cantú.” Besides this, although the document claims

“Mexican Citizen,” Cantú explains the purpose of the document is to travel to Mexico.

This is her attempt to reterritorialize the borderland as a place of multiplicities of

identities. Indeed, Cantú‟s use of the palimpsest is an indication of her shifting identity

where she carries part and parcels of her past tradition while living in the present culture

of the United States.

Regarding these palimpsestic signatures, Timothy Dow Adams writes, “The

palimpsestic signatures act as metaphoric representations of the author‟s life on the

border and of her shifting identity” (62). Adams‟ point is related to Bhabha‟s notion of

identity which is constructed and reconstructed, where life is visible in its ambiguity,

complexity, and hybridity. Postcolonial critics Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin write,

The characteristic of the palimpsest is that, despite such erasures, there are

always traces of previous inscriptions that have been „overwritten.‟ Hence

 31

the term has become particularly valuable for suggesting the ways in

which the traces of earlier „inscriptions‟ remain as a continual feature of

the „text‟ of culture, giving it its particular density and character. (Key

Concepts 174)

In Canícula, the palimpsestic signatures are important because they illustrate the ways in

which past Hispanic cultures and the experiences of the narrator are continuing aspects of

the current development of cultural hybrid identity in the borderland. Cantú is trying to

preserve her past that is Mexican and live in the present that is the United States. Cantú‟s

“teasing out such vestigial features left over from the past is an important part of

understanding the nature of the present” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, Key Concepts

174). In other words, Cantú includes the palimpsestic signatures to suggest that she is

creating a fluid border identity through the negotiations and transculturation between

Mexico and the US.

Rather than forgetting her past and assimilating to the present US culture, Cantú

creates a fluid identity that a borderland offers to her. Bhabha quotes Martin Heidegger‟s

concept about the borderland: “A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as

the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing”

(1). In Canícula too, Cantú depicts the borderland as a place for fertility, a place to begin

forming fluid identity through cultural undercurrents: “It is in the emergence of

interstices—the overlap and displacement of difference—that the intersubjectivities and

collective experiences of nationness, community interest, or cultural values are

negotiated” (Bhabha 2). Cantú shows the possibility of creating a new space in the
 32

borderland through “cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or

imposed hierarchy” (Bhabha 4).

Cantú suggests cultural hybridity through the cultural practices, traditional

celebrations, and ethnic aspects of foods in the borderland. In “China Poblana One”

Nena, the narrator, describes the family‟s return from the George Washington birthday

parade. Nena is a little girl wearing a “China Poblana” skirt. She and her family lunch on

“sopa de arroz, picadillo, guisado, and fresh corn tortillas with orange flavored Kool-

Aid” before attending the George Washington‟s birthday carnival (39). In “China

Poblana Two” she describes her mother‟s photograph. Her mother “holds her skirt and

points her foot as instructed; on the wide-brimmed charro hat the embroidery screams!

Viva Mexico!” (40). In fact “she was not born in Mexico and could read and write in only

English at the time because the nuns at Sacred Heart in San Antonio wouldn‟t tolerate

Spanish” (40). These descriptions depict life between cultures in the borderland: living in

the US, wearing a “Viva Mexico” hat and traditional Mexican clothes designed by the

Chinese, and eating traditional foods in honor of the first president of the United States.

As Pérez would say, the narrator‟s mother, like a decolonial imaginary, lives inside the

differences and constructs newness.

Amid cultural differences, Cantú consolidates two different worlds. Melody

Graulich sees Cantú as one who faces “cultural divisions and represents herself as

comfortably consolidating cultures, using cultural symbols to challenge divisions” (409).

She writes:

Dedicating her book to her „family on both sides of the border,‟ who

„argue amicably . . . about what happened,‟ and using both English and
 33

Spanish, Cantú combines text and photographs to delineate and ultimately

undermine divisions between fiction and history, past and present, Mexico

and United States, Mexican and U.S. citizenship identity. (409)

Graulich‟s view correlates with Bhabha‟s notion of hybridity as a third space that

“accepts difference without eliding or normalizing the differential structure of ideologies

in conflict; it allows us to envisage social developments enhanced by difference”

(Rutherford 214). Cantú, rather than opposing the differences, creates something new out

of them.

Cantú attempts to secure a space on the borderland that is not bounded by

arbitrarily drawn lines. She desires a transnational space where people come and go, have

multiple relationships, and mutual understandings and negotiations between different

identities. Hundreds of soldiers from both Mexico and the United States march in the

parade and celebrate George Washington‟s birthday in the downtown: “The flags go by,

the men take off their hats, and everyone places a hand over their heart—the same for the

US or the Mexican flag, but when the Mexican flag goes by someone in the crowd shouts

„Viva Mexico!‟ Viva!” (Canícula 37). The intersection of cultures is more visible when

different people attend the parade regardless of nationality and cultures along with “huge

military tanks with helmeted soldiers peering from the cubby holes; and little girls from

elementary schools from both cities parading, singing, dancing, all in unison; cowboys

and Indians on horseback, riding side by side” (37). These cultural collages are not only

the evidences of mutual relationship and understanding but show how Chicanos borrow

cultural elements from both sides of the border, and elsewhere, and weave it into

something new and distinctive.

 34

For this purpose, Cantú complicates the borderland as a fixed geographic

territory. She describes the frequent back-and-forth movements of her family and herself,

yet does not clarify which is coming home and which is going from home. As she

suggests, when Texas was annexed to the United States, most of the Mexican people

were crossing “from one Laredo to the other [Nuevo Laredo] and losing everything . . . to

the corrupt customs officials at the border” (5). Definitely, here coming home means to

be “sent in packed trains to the border on the way to Mexico” (5). However, this idea is

contradicted when Cantú writes “in 1948 crossing meant coming home, but not quite”

(5). In addition, Nena‟s experiences in Mexico suggest otherwise. When she goes to

Monterrey with her Mamagrande, she becomes “homesick for parents, and siblings, and

bingo at San Luis Rey Church” (23). If Mexico were a home for the narrator, why would

she become “homesick” in Mexico? Cantú‟s home is, as Rosemary Marangoly argues, “a

place that is flexible” (2): “at times home is nowhere. The home is no longer just one

place. It is location” (1). In other words, the home becomes a space that could be carried

over to different geographical places of migration regardless of national boundaries like

Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo in Mexico or Laredo in the United States. In fact, through a

lighthearted play on the acts of coming and going, Cantú crosses the arbitrarily drawn

national boundary.

Cantú presents the world of the borderland as a folklorist. She lives in both US

consumer and Hispanic cultures. Her identity is costumed in the “popular culture and

folklore of the borderland” (Graulich 410). In a chapter called “Cowgirl,” the Mexican

kids are dressed in cowboy outfits—part of a common culture on both sides of the border

in the US and Mexico. Quico, a Hispanic boy, wears “blue jeans” which are associated
 35

with US popular culture. Cantú, describing both popular cultures and Indian history,

writes “we played cowboys and Indians, feeling „western‟ for a long time. At the Azteca

or the Cine Mexico we watched Pedro Infante or Jorge Negrete be Mexican cowboys

who sang and wooed and never fought Indians; and on TV we watched a different story.

Those years when we watched Zorro, Hopalong Cassidy, Roy Rogers, The Cisco Kid,

[and] The Lone Ranger” (Canícula 34). They celebrate both Mexican and US celebration

days—“Day of the Dead” and Halloween; they believe in both traditional Mexican

healers and Western medicine—she goes to Monterrey, Mexico, to the healer‟s house

where people “come from all over Mexico and the United States, even some from

Europe” (123); she eats “corn tortillas and beans with a cheese guisado by the light of the

kerosene lamp” (124). These are the practices on the borderland that confirm Bhabha‟s

argument that “we are always negotiating . . . [S]ubversion is negotiation; transgression

is negotiation; negotiation is not just some kind of compromise or „selling out‟ which

people too easily understand it to be” (qtd in Rutherford 214). Negotiation becomes a

daily practice in Canícula through which Nena and her family live comfortably.

In “Mexican Citizen,” while standing in front of the mirror, Cantú asks herself,

“who am I?” (21). She describes herself as a “skinny twelve years old anxious about body

hair and breasts that seem to be growing out one larger than the other” (21-22). She is

obsessed by her breasts and longs for “eighth grade braless” (22). But she finds herself

relieved as she goes to Monterrey, Mexico, where she doesn‟t have to worry about her

big breasts. However, in Mexico she becomes “homesick for my U.S. world full of TV—

Ed Sullivan and Lucy and Dinah Shore and Lawrence Welk, Bueli‟s favorite—and Glass

Kitchen hamburgers—eight, then six for a dollar on Saturday afternoon” (22-23). In the
 36

U.S., the white classmates tease her, ridiculing her for “unplucked brows and hairy legs

and underarms [that] make a girl look like a boy” (60). She finds herself split between the

beauty ideals imposed by her white classmates and the model presented by her mother

and her Latina friends, who don‟t shave or pluck: “Mami doesn‟t shave or pluck her

eyebrows either . . . Many Chicana classmates behave like gringas, but my friends, most

of us who ride the Saunders bus, we don‟t yet shave, much less pluck our eyebrows, or

wear makeup—our parents forbid it” (61). Thus, ostensibly, the narrator seems to

experience a split between her rich, white friends‟ ideal beauty and the beauty of her

Latina family and friends, yet it is not so. In fact, when I asked her if her narrator felt split

between ideals of white beauty and Chicana values, Cantú replied, “Not necessarily. Here

she is not opposing one and accepting the other. Rather, here she is trying to show the

fluidity of identity in the borderland” (Paudyal, “Conversation with Cantú”). Cantú‟s

response is an indication to the culture‟s hybridity that creates a third space.

Cantú presents the borderland between the United States and Mexico as a place

where mobility, migration, hybridity, and transculturation take place. The borderland in

her depicted world is “a safe place between two countries” (Canícula 2) where people

negotiate continuously among the differences and constitute and reconstitute modern

fluid identities. In this regard, Bhabha‟s notion of third space, which he developed

particularly to describe the cultural identity formation under the colonial situation in

South Asia, accounts for the complexities on the Texas-Mexico borderland decades later.

The reterritorialization of borderland in Canícula steers away from the problems of

racism and discrimination and enhances the mutual understanding between different

identities by opening up a new transnational space. Thus, Cantú‟s representation of the

 37

borderland and Lahiri‟s representation of transglobal migration can be read side by side.

They share a similar treatment toward forming a hybrid and transnational identity for

their characters. Like Canícula, Lahiri‟s The Namesake depicts an in-between world of

Indian immigrants in the USA, where they reinvent their transnational identities through

negotiation and adaptation of different cultures in modified forms.

 CHAPTER III

BETWEEN THE LINES: FORMATION OF TRANSNATIONAL

IDENTITY IN JHUMPA LAHIRI‟S THE NAMESAKE

Towards the second-half of The Namesake (2003), Gogol celebrates his twenty-

seventh birthday at his girlfriend Maxine‟s parents‟ lake house in New Hampshire

without his parents. Maxine and her mother Lydia throw a special dinner to celebrate

his birthday. At dinner Gogol encounters Pamela, a middle-aged white woman who

insists on viewing him as Indian, despite his polite response that he is from Boston.

Although Gogol is a naturalized citizen of the United States, he encounters the question

“where do you come from?” Pamela comments that Gogol must never get sick when he

travels to India. When Gogol denies it, she asserts, “but you‟re an Indian . . . . I‟d think

the climate wouldn‟t affect you, given your heritage” (156). Maxine‟s mother corrects

Pamela, asserting that Gogol is American; but in the end even she hesitates, asking him

if he actually was born in the United States (157). Even Gogol‟s United States

citizenship does not guarantee his identity as an American.

In a stereotypical reading, this tendency to categorize Gogol as an Indian might

be viewed as an example of “Othering” of “Indian” immigrants in the United States,

where individuals are identified according to their roots, rather than their country of

residence or citizenship.vi However, The Namesake is a novel that celebrates the cultural

hybridity resulting from globalization and the interconnectedness of the modern world

and rethinks conventional immigrant experiences. Lahiri is aware of the existing

problems of cultural diversity in the multicultural United States, and she argues that the
 39

struggle to grasp a transnational identity becomes an urgent issue for immigrants in this

environment. While she represents Gogol as someone who is confused about his

identity, she also presents Gogol as a prototypical transnational agent who lives

between two different worlds with the possibility of creating multiplicity of identities.

In fact, Lahiri offers a re-vision of the contemporary United States not as a static and

insular territory but a participant in transnational relations. Given the nature of mobility

of people and their cultures across nations, Lahiri deterritorializes the definite national

and cultural identities of India suggesting that individuals cannot confine themselves

within the narrow concept of national and cultural boundaries in this globalized world

characterized by hybridity, tranasculturation, and migration. In this regard, Lahiri‟s

representation of the Indian immigrants in the United States is similar to Arjun

Appadurai‟s suggestion that the notions of nativeness and native places have become

very complex as more and more people identify themselves, or are categorized, in

reference to deterritorialized “homelands,” “cultures,” and “origins” (Modernity at

Large 34). To explain the understanding of the contemporary global system and

interconnectedness, Appardurai coins the idea of “scapes”. His concept of scapes

indicates changing social, territorial, and cultural reproduction of group identity where

people regroup in new locations and reconstruct their histories far from their place of

origin.

Indeed, when Lahiri‟s characters are no longer spatially bound to a single place,

a “woof of human motion” occurs and they “deal with the realities of having to move or

the fantasies of wanting to move” (Appadurai 34). As they are not able to feel at home

in the new territory, they develop a sense of inhabiting imaginary homelands. While
 40

they live in present experiences of new cultures, they also inherit and practice parts of

their cultures of origin, which is a process of hybrid identity formation that Lisa Lowe

calls “practices that are partly inherited, partly modified, as well as partly invented”

(65). Although the immigrants are immersed to the cultures of the United States, the

deterritorialization of their identities becomes profound as they adapt and preserve their

cultures in modified forms. Although they live physically in the U.S., they also live

emotionally in their land of origin. As such, the immigrants live in between two

different cultural lines, negotiating the different worlds and adopting hybrid identities

through transnational exchange.

By between the lines, I refer to the unarticulated space between two cultures

where cultural transformation takes place. This in-between space is, thus, a place of

hybridity and negotiation. Bhabha argues that the intercultural space where hybrid

identity is formed is a space of “in-betweenness and liminality” (37). He also recognizes

this liminal space as the “Third Space” characterized by “discursive conditions of

enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial

unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, and

rehistoricized anew” (37). This Third Space ideally exists where people of different

cultures accept and blend their practices and values without one dominating the other,

but it can also exist where there is a dominant culture, as usually happens in the

experiences of immigrants in the United States. Thus, this liminal space between the

cultures of immigrants and the host societies causes individuals to go through a process

that deconstructs the fixed notion of identity.

 41

Building upon Bhabha‟s idea of in-between space, my use of between the lines

examines and identifies the transnational elements in Lahiri‟s The Namesake that evoke

the space of Indians‟ U.S. diaspora. By so doing, I investigate the fertility of the space

between the diverse cultures where the intersection of different people requires

exploration. Until now this complicated but fertile space in the study of

transnationalism has been rarely explored. Linda Basch, Schiller, and Blanc argue that

“it is only in contemporary fiction (Anzaldúa 1987, Ghosh 1988, Marshalll 1991,

Rushdie 1988) that this state of „in-betweenness,‟ has been fully voiced” (8). Thus,

applying the concept of cultural translation, I argue that by representing her characters

at the crossroad where both local and global spaces meet and where the constant

negotiation of different cultural experiences occur, Lahiri depicts a transnational space

for the Indian immigrants in the United States. Although the immigrants‟ tenacity in

clinging to the past is obvious in such space, over time they develop and recreate a

space in the U.S. through a constant negotiation between different identities which

transcends the definite cultural and national boundaries of a single nation. Ultimately,

this conversation constitutes a form of transnational identity.

The Namesake explores the conflicts of Indian immigrants for both the first and

second generations, spanning a time period from the late 1960s to the early twenty-first

century in the United States. The characters are middle class Bengalis, well versed in

both Indian and British education. They bring with them enough cultural associations to

recreate their “imagined political community,” with the first generation protagonists

constantly recalling their birth country with longing and occasional visits to India

(Anderson 6).
 42

The story starts with Ashoke Ganguli, who, as a young student in India decides

to further his education in the United States after a train accident that nearly costs him

his life (The Namesake 17-18). His trip to India from the United States for an Indian

wife, Ashima, follows a second generation that turns into the hyphenated Indian

Americans with a dual culture, or the ABCD—“American Born Confused Deshi” (118).

Here “Deshi” means simply Indian and desh is India (118). Gogol is an exemplary

ABCD who cannot answer the question, “where are you from?” (118). For him the

notion of home is very complicated. He is baffled to answer whether he is from India or

the United States. However, Gogol does not think of India as his country or “desh;” he

sees himself as purely American—unhyphenated Indian American.

Though Gogol considers himself an American, he is brought up between two

diametrically different cultures, similar to Bhabha‟s in-between space where people can,

to a certain extent, move and negotiate within their worlds (1-2). He is both Indian and

American. He belongs to Indian parents on a different geographical space than India

and is acculturated as an Indian at home. But outside the home, he is an American. He

thinks of India as a “foreign country far away from home, both physically and

psychologically” (The Namesake 118). He struggles to reconcile his dual cultures. On

the one hand, he is fascinated with the free and happy lifestyles of his American

girlfriend, Maxine; on the other he feels a sense of obligation towards his parents. Like

that of every immigrant child, Gogol‟s real challenge is to secure an identity in the

midst of differences.

Influenced by U.S. lifestyle, Gogol tries to distance himself from his parents and

adopt an American identity. He spends “his nights with Maxine, sleeping under the
 43

same roof as her parents, a thing Ashima refuses to admit to her Bengali friends” (166).

His identity is strongly identified with cultures that play a crucial role in the formation

of modern immigrant identity which is “de-centered” (Hall, “The Question of Cultural

Identity” 274). A culture is, as Vijay Prasad defines, “a living set of social relations,”

rather than a “timeless trait” (112). It is not a fixed site of meaning, or simply “common

historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provides us, as „one people‟ with

stable unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning” (Hall, “Cultural

Identity and Diaspora” 393). Prasad‟s and Hall‟s ideas on culture are important to

understand the modern cultural identity of Lahiri‟s characters. In fact, her characters

attempt to form a multiplicity of identities in a process of cultural formation. Their

cultural identity formation includes pieces of cultural inheritance to incorporate into

their lives as Americans, which is similar to Hall‟s idea of “being” and “becoming” of

cultural identity (“Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation” 70).vii

Lahiri‟s focus on the tension between past and present complicates Hall‟s idea

of being and becoming. For instance, Gogol lives between the worlds of past and

present. Although he attempts to escape from the past by denouncing his cultural roots

and changing his name, he is somehow connected to his roots. He is uncomfortable with

his name that has so many connections with his past. He likewise cannot understand the

significance of the name Gogol that his parents chose for him. Rather it is because of

the very name that he is teased by his friends and his name is mispronounced by his

teachers. As a result, when he turns eighteen, he goes into a Massachusetts courtroom

and asks the judge to change his name, providing as his reason that he “hates the name

Gogol” (79). Although Gogol believes that by switching his name to Nikhil he would
 44

get rid of his past, his parents‟ obstinate insistence on calling him by his original name

symbolizes that a simple name change does not alter the fabric of a person. It is a

symbol of something that he learns later through his father that his name Gogol is

connected to his father‟s past life. Ashoke tells Gogol “the story of the train he had

ridden twenty-eight years ago, in October 1961 . . . about the night that had nearly taken

his life, and the book that had saved him, and about the year afterward, when he‟d been

unable to move” (123). Through the story of his father and the train accident, Gogol

learns that the significance of his name is so strongly associated with his father‟s

unforgettable past that he cannot escape so easily. Ashoke survived the accident

because he was reading Gogol‟s “The Overcoat” when the accident occurred near two

hundred and nine kilometers away from Calcutta “killing the passengers in their sleep”

(17). Gogol realizes how his life has been interwoven between the past and present.

However, although Gogol is living in the in-between space and struggling to balance the

two different worlds, he still longs to escape from his cultural roots and venture into his

U.S. girlfriend‟s life.

By contrasting the lifestyles between Gogol‟s and Maxine‟s parents, Lahiri

suggests that the immigrant children are fascinated to adopt the American lifestyle.

Gogol‟s immersion into his girlfriend‟s life is an indication of a second generation

immigrant child‟s realization that an identity far from their own cultural roots is a

necessity to live happily in the multicultural United States. It is Gogol‟s ability to

understand the difference between the lives of his parents and Maxine‟s that prompts

him to desire Maxine‟s lifestyle. He is surprised to find the warm welcome from
 45

Maxine‟s parents. At the dinner table, he is impressed with their style—an opportunity

to compare between his parents‟ way of serving dinner with Maxine‟s parents:

A bowl of small, round, roasted red potatoes is passed around, and

afterward a salad. They eat appreciatively, commenting on the

tenderness of the meat, the freshness of the beans. His own mother

would never have served so few dishes to a guest. She would have kept

her eyes trained on Maxine‟s plate, insisting she have seconds and then

thirds. The table would have been lined with a row of serving bowls so

that people could help themselves; but Lydia pays no attention to

Gogol‟s plate, she makes no announcement indicating that there is more.

(133)

Gogol finds a sense of freedom and independence even in the dinner table at Maxine‟s

house. Insisting someone empty the plate or requesting to eat more, which is a common

practice in Indian culture, is something that irritates Gogol. On the contrary, he finds no

obligation to eat more at Maxine‟s house. Thus, though the passage is simply a

description of a dinner table, Lahiri‟s use of delicate language reveals a sense of freedom

at the American dinner table. It is this freedom and individualism that instigate a desire

for U.S. way of life in Gogol.

Although Gogol is unaccustomed to such U.S. table manners, “this sort of talk at

mealtimes, to the indulgent ritual of the lingering meal, and the pleasant aftermath of

bottle and crumbs and empty glasses that clutter the table” (134), he learns to love the

food Maxine and her parents eat, the potato and risotto, the bouillabaisse and osso buco,

the meat baked in parchment paper (137). Not only Gogol‟s affection for Maxine
 46

suggests his adoption of interracial dating and love, but also the adoption of most of the

American demeanor because for him “to know her and love her is to know and love all

of these things” (137). In fact, Gogol‟s love for her is a result of his strong desire for

everything she possesses—the individual lifestyle of Maxine who has “no sense of

obligation,” and “unlike his parents her parents pressure her to do nothing, and yet she

lives faithfully, happily, at their side” (138). In other words, Gogol‟s cultural identity

formation is highly affected by what Prasad calls “a set of social relations” within the

society he lives in (112). Gogol‟s position emphasizes the necessity of the formation of

a transnational identity which requires negotiation of the cultural borderlands between

the United States and India.

Bhabha suggests that the in-between space of the cultural borderland is a place

of transformation and change where fixed and essential identities are deconstructed.

For this reason, he asserts that “the borderline work of culture demands an encounter

with „newness‟ that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of

the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation” (7). Bhabha argues that such

borderline culture innovates the performance of present by renewing the past,

“refiguring it as a contingent in-between space” (7). Read from the framework of

Bhabha‟s notion of borderline culture, Lahiri‟s characters can be seen dwelling between

different cultures and engaging in transcultural conversations. The interaction between

her characters and the host groups slowly opens up the space for cultural transformation

that characterizes the “in-between as a third element, an amalgam of two cultural

entities that create a third after the original two have been altered” (Basch, Schiller, and

Blanc 37). One of the important techniques that Lahiri uses in the novel to liberate her
 47

characters from the narrowed confinement of national boundaries is her contrast

between the initial and latter attitudes and behavior of the characters. In the beginning

Lahiri‟s characters are seen holding strictly to their cultural roots. But later they go

through changes in their demeanor.

However, cultural transformation does not take place at once in The Namesake.

It becomes a process that shuttles the characters towards forming their identities as

hybrid and transnational. This process, for example, can be seen in Ashima by

contrasting her character in different stages of her life in the United States. When she

first comes to the United States, she feels completely lonely in the foreign land. She is

shocked to find people who live detached from one another. When the time comes to

give birth to her first child, she is “terrified to raise a child in a country where she is

related to no one, where she knows so little, where life seems so tentative and spare”

(6). She remembers her home country where most of the relatives and elders gather for

blessings when a baby is born. In contrast, she finds no one surrounding her and her

child in the United States except “Nandis and Dr. Gupta, who are only the substitutes

for the people who really ought to be surrounding them” (24). This is a common

experience of immigrants unaccustomed to new cultures of the new land. Ashima does

not have any other choice than to study her son and pity him for “she has never known

of a person entering the world so alone, so deprived” (25).

In an attempt to ameliorate the loneliness, at least temporarily, Ashima practices

Indian cultural values at her new home in Boston. She preserves the Indian food recipes,

the Indian dress, the sari which is a key example of the maintenance of cultural identity

that Indians are so proud of. She clings to her six-meter dress until the end, challenging
 48

even the coldest temperature of Massachusetts. The bindi, that usually adorns the

forehead of an Indian married woman, is another cultural possession that Ashima

adheres to daily. She cooks Indian foods “combining Rice Crispies and Planters

peanuts and chopped red onion in a bowl; she adds salt, lemon juice, thin slices of green

chili pepper, wishing there were mustard oil to pour into the mix” (1). She prefers to

read “a tattered copy of Desh magazine” printed in her mother tongue (7). She does not

even say her husband‟s name, a practice in South Asia, particularly in Nepal and India.

Usually husbands are called with the name of the first child plus “father”—for example,

Gogol‟s father. Ashima does not call her husband Gogol‟s father, but never utters his

first name: “Like a kiss or caress in a Hindi movie, a husband‟s name is something

intimate and therefore unspoken, cleverly patched over. And so, instead of saying

Ashoke‟s name, she utters the interrogative that has come to replace it, which translates

roughly as „Are you listening to me?‟” (2). Like Ashima, Moushumi‟s mother is also a

typical example of an Indian wife. A traditional woman in India does not hold a job, but

remains a homemaker. She is almost ignorant of the outer world. Similarly, although

Moushumi‟s mother lived abroad for thirty-two years, in England and now in the United

States, she “does not know how to drive a car, does not have a job, and does not know

the difference between a checking account and a savings account. And yet she is a

perfectly intelligent woman, was an honors student in philology at Presidency College

before she was married off at twenty-two” (247).

However, here Lahiri‟s concern is not to emphasize the ancestral cultural values

that her characters hold in the United States. Rather, by juxtaposing the immigrants‟

initial experiences and practices in the United States with their latter adoption and
 49

immersion into the U.S. culture, she suggests the transient nature of identity, pushing

the characters towards inhabiting transnational space on U.S. soil. As Lahiri‟s

immigrant characters live in the liminal space by attempting to adhere to the old values

and negating U.S. culture, something new begins to emerge. In this regard, their

immigrant experience reflects what Bhabha suggests: “The negating activity is, indeed,

the intervention of the beyond that establishes a boundary; a bridge, where presencing

begins because it captures something of the estranging sense of the relocation of the

home and the world” (9). Bhabha‟s concern about cross-cultural initiations is

particularly evident in Ashima. Although she resists U.S. culture in the beginning, later

she starts to adopt it. A sense of relocation replaces her earlier feelings of homelessness

in the United States.

Practically, transformation through the intercultural conversation is a necessary

condition for immigrants living in the metropolitan cities. To locate themselves in a new

space, they need to realize their in-between status, and go through certain changes in

their practices and lives. Basch, Schiller, and Blanc claim that only a few immigrant

authors (excluding Lahiri) have fully voiced the in-between space. However, here I

would like to add Lahiri into that category of writers, since not only has she

demonstrated the importance of in-between space, but also has, by deconstructing the

narrow national and cultural identity for the immigrants, attempted to locate them into

the mainstream white society. She suggests that identity based on national culture is a

“potent site of control and domination within modern society” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and

Tiffin, Key Concepts 150). In other words, as long as immigrants are resistant to

adopting a multiplicity of identities, they risk being the victims of discrimination. Thus,
 50

unlike the stereotypical characters in postcolonial literature who suffer cultural

dislocation and alienation due to their inability to negotiate and transform, Lahiri‟s

characters‟ resistance to adopting US culture gradually declines: “As their lives in New

England swell with fellow Bengali friends, the members of that other, former life, those

who know Ashima and Ashoke not by their good names, but as Monu and Mithu,

slowly dwindle” (63).

Ashima‟s immigrant homesickness and resistance to the host culture gradually

compels her to emerge from the shelter of the Indian extended family into the American

nuclear family. She enters the U.S. culture of individualism by going out and buying her

groceries and pushing a stroller like all American mothers. This step towards

independence brings some “pride in doing it alone, in devising a routine” (34). When

she retrieves all her shopping items at “the MBTA lost and found . . .[and] not a

teaspoon [is] missing” (42), she begins to trust the American system and to feel

“connected to Cambridge in a way she has not previously thought possible” (43). She

learns to do a lot of American things. She starts inviting non-Indian friends to her home,

American women who also become her shopping companions (162-3). She also learns

about other women living alone because they are divorced and about “dating in middle

age” (162).

This is the same Ashima who always had feared her children turning into

Americans, who used to cook Indian foods, and who for the first time had felt a touch of

a man by putting her feet into the American made shoes of Ashoke at the age of

nineteen. She was against Gogol‟s love affair with a white American girl. But now she

becomes positive about an intercultural love affair and marriage: “from time to time his
 51

mother asks him if he has a new girlfriend. In the past she broached the topic

defensively, but now she even asks one day whether it is possible to patch things up

with Maxine” (191). It is her understanding of different cultures and her living in

different social relations that make Ashima become more tolerant of her children‟s

Americanization.

Such changes in attitude, an attempt to be released from the confinement of

narrow national identity, can be seen in other characters too. Moushumi‟s parents accept

an American guy named Graham as their son-in-law. When she brings him home in

New Jersey, to her enormous surprise, her parents welcome him. Like American

parents, they think that Moushumi is old enough to decide her life so “it didn‟t matter to

them that he was an American. Enough of their friends‟ children had married

Americans, had produced pale, dark-skinned, half-American grandchildren, and none of

it was as terrible as they had feared” (216).

Similarly, consolidating Indian culture with American seems quite acceptable

for Ashoke too. He is an enthusiastic reader not only of Charles Dickens, Graham

Greene and Somerset Maugham, but also of eminent Russian writers like Dostoyevsky

and Tolstoy (12-13). He looks to the West for inspiration or self-liberation, believing

that the West is a more fortunate place. A chance encounter by Ashoke on a train with a

fellow Bengali, Ghosh, reiterates the rhetoric of the West/United States as the place of

prosperity. Given his willingness to depart and to prosper, he begins “to envision

another sort of future . . . walking away, as far as he could from the place in which he

was born and in which he had nearly died” (20). Influenced by prosperity, he slides

more easily into the process of Americanization when he arrives in the United States.
 52

The “fountain pen” which is a marker of high status for Indian intellectuals, a custom

most probably borrowed from the English tradition, gives way to the American

“ballpoint” (65). He “stops wearing jackets and ties to the University,” despite being a

tenured full professor, because he does not want to appear different from his American

colleagues (65). His purchase of a house for his family in the New English

neighborhood “appear[s] no different from their neighbors,” except for “the name on

the mailbox, and apart from the issues of Indian Abroad and Sangbad Bichitra that are

delivered there” (64). Later, this house becomes a place where frequent gatherings of

the Bengali community take place and even debate intensely “about the politics of

America, a country in which none of them is eligible to vote,” but which indicates their

allegiance to their American space (38).

Through these gatherings in the Ganguli household, Lahiri suggests Hall‟s

delineation of “cultural identity in terms of one, shared culture, a sort of collective „one

true self,‟ hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed „selves,‟

which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common” (“Cultural Identity

and Diaspora” 393). Like Hall‟s argument, what appears to be most suitable for these

Bengali families is that they all come from Calcutta and are Bengalis, all of which turns

into a common terrain for speaking the Bengali language and other similar practices.

For instance, Gogol‟s baptism, “the annaprasan, his rice ceremony” (38), which

symbolizes “the Bengali staff for life” (39). It is the first big event that brings these

Bengali families to the Ganguli‟s place; the Nandis, the Mitras, the Banerjees (38). It is

a shared culture that prompts them to get together to celebrate each ceremony and

festival in the United States. The gatherings of Bengali families at the Ganguli‟s house
 53

as the basis for shared cultural identities are seen to be more pertinent when Ashoke

passes away. At this difficult time all the “friends of the family” come to Ganguli‟s

house from six different states lining up their cars the whole of Pemberton Road, and

take care of them: “for the first week, they are never alone; No longer a family of four,

they become a household of ten, sometimes twenty, friends coming by to sit with them

quietly in the living room, their heads bent, drinking cups of tea, a cluster of people

attempting to make up for his father‟s loss” (179).

Occasionally, the Gangulis also make a few summer visits to other places in the

United States or Canada, “where they had other Bengali friends” (155), and their Indian

lifestyle would be replicated in feats such as having a big group of people “huddled” in

a rented van, or they would rent a single room that would accommodate more than one

family” (155). Gogol remembers that once they went to “a Christmas party at

[Moushumi‟s) parent‟s home. He and Sonia had not wanted to go; Christmas was

supposed to be spent with just family” (201). Brought up in the US culture, Gogol and

Sonia know that such festivals are meant to be celebrated in their own home among the

family members. But their parents believe that “in America, Bengali friends were the

closest thing they had to family” and they instruct them to respect the Bengali people

(201).

However, Lahiri illustrates that these Indian immigrants are estranged from their

birth country and have adopted some specific characteristics of the new cultures over

time. They “learn to roast turkeys . . . at Thanksgiving, to nail a wreath to their door in

December, to wrap woolen scarves around the snowmen, to color boiled eggs violet and

pink at Easter” (64). Although these are Christian celebrations, these characters practice
 54

them the way they prepare for the Hindu celebration of festivities associated with

Goddesses Durga and Saraswati (64). Turkey at Thanksgiving is a U.S. cultural tradition,

but they prepare turkey the way they used to roast chicken back in India: “rubbed with

garlic and cumin and cayenne” (64). Similarly, like the Durga Pooja, one of the greatest

festivals in Hinduism, which is celebrated among the people of the same community,

they celebrate Christmas at another Bengali house. These characters not only gather to

celebrate Indian festivities and customs and maintain their cultural ideologies, but also to

observe Christian celebrations, yet in an evolving way. They have made Christian

holidays part of their own cultural tradition even though they are not Christian.

In this regard, Lahiri‟s characters‟ behavior and attitudes are related to

Appadurai‟s idea of transnational imaginary landscapes. Appadurai points out that “the

United States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of images, but only one node

of complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes” (Appadurai 31).

Referring to the re-rooting of the ethnic groups in the United States, he claims that

“these landscapes, thus, are the building blocks of what (extending Benedict Anderson)

I would like to call imagined worlds, that is the multiple worlds that are constituted by

the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe”

(33). Lahiri projects her immigrant characters into such an imaginary landscape, where

they must negotiate between different identities and re-root themselves between the

newly acquired US space and Indian cultural practices. Consequently, Lahiri questions

the social and cultural implications of Indian immigrants as part of a minority that

thrives in the United States and highlights a new American identity for them.
 55

Lahiri concentrates on the reciprocity relationship and transnational exchange

between the two cultural groups. Basch, Schiller, and Blanc define transnationalism as

“the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations

that link together their societies of origin and settlement . . . that cross geographic,

cultural and political borders” (7). Relating to this definition, we find Lahiri‟s characters

constantly participating in the process of transnational identity formation. In this sense,

Lahiri‟s characters are the transmigrants “who develop and maintain multiple

relationships . . . that span borders” (Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 7). They involve

themselves in the “actions, make decisions, and develop subjectivities and identities

embedded in networks of relationships that connect them simultaneously to two or more

nation-states” (Basch, Schiller, and Blanc 7).

Lahiri emphasizes not only the situation of immigrants who leave somewhere

called home to make a new home in the United States, but also the endless process of

comings and goings that create familial, cultural, linguistic, and economic ties across

national borders. These back and forth movements by immigrants are associated with

transnationalism, which is “a state where people live dual lives; speak two languages

and have two homes in two countries” (Yeoh, Charney, and Kiong 2). After her

husband‟s death and her children‟s settlement, Ashima decides to return to India. This

decision, ostensibly, implies that she is going to find her roots, her place in India.

However, it is remarkable that she does not abandon the United States. Rather she plans

to divide her time equally between India and the United States.

Yeoh, Charney, and Kiong. argue that the “hypermobility and the easy

transgression of national borders in today‟s globalizing world may well be liberating or

 56

emancipatory for the individuals involved, but may also reinforce existing social

ideologies, including those of the nation state” (2). These ideologies show the

transnational subjects as “embodied beings, as bearers of gender, ethnicity, class, race,

nationality, and at the same time agents constantly negotiating these self-identities vis-

à-vis others in transnational spaces” (2-3). The significance of Yeoh, Charney, and

Kiong‟s idea in The Namesake is that the immigrant characters like Ashima and Ashoke

appear to be both the carriers of Indian cultural and national identities, and the

transnational agents who constantly attempt to consolidate two different worlds and

create a new space in the United States. To put this idea in another way, Lahiri suggests

that transnationalism is not the negation of nationalism and histories. Rather

transnationalism “insists on the continuing significance of borders, states policies, and

national identities even as these are often transgressed by transnational communication

circuits and social practices” (qtd. in Yeoh, Charney, and Kiong 2). For this reason,

Lahiri‟s characters practice both Indian and U.S. cultural values on the U.S. soil and

create what Appadurai calls “imagined worlds.” As they live in or connect with

different worlds, their identities are not limited by the location. Instead, their identities

become fluid and flexible in a new space.

Lahiri‟s own national and cultural background lends legitimacy to the novel‟s

construction of transnational identity. While the focus of the novel is on second-

generation immigrants‟ struggle to balance the two worlds (India and United States), the

integral part of the novel is first- generation immigrants‟ construction of transnational

identity through transformation after arriving in the United States which involves issues

of immigration, race and class. In so doing, Lahiri rejects and casts off India‟s Third
 57

World status as the Other and validates Indian immigrants‟ presence in the United

States. Therefore, her characters are not only the higher ranks of academics, but also the

upper-middle class Indian immigrants who have achieved university degrees from Yale,

MIT, or Brown, have prestigious jobs and earn big paychecks. When Gogol turns

eighteen, “like the rest of their Bengali friends, his parents expect him to be, if not an

engineer, then a doctor, a lawyer, an economist at the very least. These are fields that

brought them to the United States, his father repeatedly reminds him, the professions

that have earned them security and respect” (105). As a result, Gogol attends the

prestigious institution of Yale and later graduates “from the architecture program in

Columbia” (125). Like him, Moushumi is a Brown University alumnus and later a

graduate student in French Literature at NYU (195). Her father “is a renowned chemist

with a patent to his name” (192).

Lahiri‟s depiction of the privileged class characters— “teachers, researchers,

engineers”—represent the transmigrants of a changing U.S. identity. By doing so, Lahiri

does not imply that cosmopolitan mobility is a luxury only to the privileged class

immigrants. Rather, she creates a transnational space and locates and stabilizes South

Asian immigrants in the United States. Her characters, estranged in the conflict to

balance two different worlds, enable us to understand the complexities and existential

confusion of the immigrants in the new land of settlement. Yet, Lahiri emphasizes the

necessity of creating a transnational identity to overcome these complexities. Therefore,

her characters confront immigrant experiences in the United States and, constantly

negotiate between different aspects of their lives, recreating a third space that transcends

the definite cultural and national boundaries.

 58

Lahiri‟s demonstration of the Indian immigrants varies slightly from Cantú‟s

depiction of Hispanic people who have lived on the U.S. side of a shared border for

decades since the annexation of Texas. Although both writers present the complexities of

the immigrants, Lahiri‟s characters are more comfortable in adopting the hybrid

identities. The globalization of the world and the technological changes affect Lahiri‟s

characters‟ identity formation, paving a way to the endless process of comings and goings

that create familial, cultural, and economic ties across national borders. These new

technologies, especially cheap commercial flights, accelerate cultural exchange and

intensify Bhabha‟s concept of the Third Space. For instance, in The Namesake the

process of transformation occurs sooner and easier among the first-generation immigrants

like Ashima and Ashoke in comparision to Papi in Canícula. Papi is still resistant to

change and to adopt hybrid culture even though he has been living there for decades.

However, the creation of transnational identity is the major concern of both Cantú and

Lahiri.
 CHAPTER IV

CONCLUSION

I have identified Lahiri and Cantú as immigrant writers who position themselves

geo-politically within the United States. My attempt has been to explore the ways in

which these writers construct transnational identities for immigrants while locating and

stabilizing them in the United States. I‟ve also tried to analyze factors that influence the

transcultural conversation and the formation of cultural identities of immigrant

characters. This comparative study demonstrates that these contemporary immigrant

writers are aware of constructing transnational identities for their characters, transcending

national and cultural borders. The depiction of cultural identity formation by these two

writers is similar, despite the different historical settings.

In conclusion, I would like to look at what we learn about transnationalism,

identity formation and cultural exchange by putting Cantú and Lahiri side by side. The

major themes of these writers center on issues of cultural identity formation. Cantú‟s

work interrogates many notions about the borderland as a place of chaos, racial/cultural

tension and distrust. Cantú attempts to reverse these notions by representing the

borderland as a third space where mobility of people and culture take place, and multiple

identities are negotiated. The cultural conversation ultimately opens up the possibility of

emerging hybrid identities. Similarly, Lahiri‟s novel provides a fascinating representation

of the ways in which first-and-second generation immigrants negotiate different identities

through cultural conversation, and overcome the cultural issues in the United States.

Lahiri concentrates on the formation of hybrid identity, which is transnational, for her
 60

characters. She positions her characters in-between the different cultures where

transformation takes place, deconstructing the fixed notion of identity.

But while both Lahiri and Cantú astutely construct a transnational space on

American soil, they differ in their approach and method. Lahiri focuses on the comings

and goings of people in the United States. Lahiri‟s characters are, in Basch, Schiller, and

Blanc‟s term, “transmigrants” who maintain multiple relationships with different people

that connect them to two or more nations. Lahiri‟s characters are educated people, in tune

with global phenomena and new technologies. For instance, Ashoke knew about the

United States (West) when he traveled on a train in India. It is a chance, or a result of

technological development, that he meets Mr. Bose who has traveled to Europe and

different parts of the world, and knows much about it. Globalization and changes in

technologies play a vital role in constructing transnational identities for Lahiri‟s

characters.

Cantú approaches transnationalism rather differently. She chooses characters that

dwell in the borderland. I call them immigrant characters because when Texas was

merged into the United States, they became immigrants on their own territory. For this

reason, I put Cantú into the category of immigrant writers. Thus, Cantú‟s major concern

in this text is to deconstruct the very notion of the borderline and recreate a transnational

space in the borderline. In her representation of her characters, Cantú meticulously

reveals the arbitrariness of the borderline along with the nation, culture, and race. The

unique structure of her book itself dismantles borders and reaffirms the hybridity of lives

in the borderland. Since the issues raised in both texts directly refer to the crossing of

national and cultural borders, there is a nexus between these two writers despite their
 61

different cultural backgrounds and contexts. This common ground is the third space

which is a site for transformation. Through this space, a place to negotiate between

different identities, people can overcome immigrant issues like race, class, nationality and

cultures.

A formation of transnational identity does not negate the notion of nation or

national borders. Constructing a transnational identity means making a connection

between different nations and their people by crossing boundaries. This process of

border-crossing constitutes the notion of identity as always shifting into hybrid and

transnational identities. A comparison of the transnational identity of the 1950s in

Canícula and that of the 1970s through the twenty-first century in The Namesake

demonstrates that identities are becoming more transnational and global due to the

development of technologies and increased global connections between people. As a

consequence of globalization, technological development and mass media, today it‟s not

only the immigrants who are on the process of negotiation and transformation to form a

transnational identity, but also the people from the host societies that are adopting

multiplicities of identity. For example, on October 15, 2009 President Barak Obama

extended his warm wishes for Dipawali (Diwali in India), a Hindu festival of lights, and

celebrated the festival by lighting candles in the White House. Obama‟s gesture is an

acknowledgement of multiplicities within the US culture in practice, not limited in

rhetoric.
 62

NOTES

i
For personal reasons, I have changed the name.
ii
Originally the term deterritorialization was coined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to refer to the
freeing of labor power from a rigidly imposed hierarchical context in the modern capitalist societies. They
believe that capitalism “is continually reterritorializing with one hand what it is deterritorializing with the
other” producing “neoterritorialities” (qtd in Kraniauskas 130). Recently the term has been widely used by
the anthropologists and social scientist like Arjun Appardurai and Néstor García Canclini to designate the
cultural transformation in the globalized world which James Lull recognizes as “the partial apart of cultural
structures, relationships, settings, and representations” (Media, Communication, Culture 239).
iii
According to Appadurai, there is a global cultural economy which can be best understood in terms of the
interconnectedness and interaction of five dimensions of global cultural flows: Ethnoscapes or “the
landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live, mediascapes which refer to “the
distribution of the electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information, technoscapes or “the
global configuration of technology,” financescapes is “the disposition of global capital” and, ideoscapes
which are “composed of elements of the Enlightenment worldview” consisting “a chain of ideas”
(Appadurai 33-36).
iv
Basch et al. define the term transmigrant to refer to the Immigrants, who develop and maintain
multiple relationships— familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political—between two
countries or more that span borders.
v
For example, I quoted earlier Anthony Appiah from his article “The Case for Contamination” that
illustrates his positive view on cultural hybridity.
vi
Not to confuse with native Indians. Throughout the essay, I use the term Indian immigrants to indicate
people who migrated from India, a country in South Asia.
vii
Hall argues that cultural identity is “a matter of becoming as well as being” which “belongs to the future
as much as to the past.” “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation” 70.
 63

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