Resisting Bodies in Diaspora: The Negotiation of Female Agency in the Works of Meena Alexander, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee and Monica Ali

• Main Authors: Hsin-JuKuo, 郭欣茹
• Other Authors: Rufus Cook
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/40698643556883769855

博士 === 國立成功大學 === 外國語文學系碩博士班 === 98 === This dissertation traces the contemporary immigrant narratives of the South Asian female writers Meena Alexander, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, and Monica Ali, examining the ways in which the main female characters Sandhya Rosenblum, Jasmine, Mrs. Sen, Ashima Ganguli and Nazneen act as the epitome of the various ways in which immigrant identities of South Asian women are narratively resisted, performed, negotiated, and transgressed. The female protagonists display a revision of the tradition of immigrant literature by showing a fragmentary concept of identity. Neither persuaded by the assimilation models of cultural identity reformation nor adopting a complete rejection of foreign culture by adhering to a nostalgic melancholy, they advance a heteroglossic, dialogical concept of self and open up a spectrum-like space between the two extremes of immigrant narratives. Marked as dislocated and marginalized, the immigrant woman’s body signifies emergent diasporic subjectivities and identities, revealing the importance of the lived body as a vital facet of the migratory experience. This dissertation not only explores the ways in which immigrant female bodies serve as sites for the articulation of the traumatic displacement, but also attempts to study the transgressive ways in which the female bodies become the loci for resistance and ultimately for the construction of negotiable agency. I draw my academic inspiration from a wide range of theories as well as border studies in approaching these selected works. I read these immigrant women’s rebuttals to varied coercive ideologies, such as Indian patriarchy, nationalism and westernized assimilation, as situated in the intersecting space crisscrossed by postcolonialism, ethnic studies and transnational feminism, and have selectively referred to theoretical concepts drawn from each of these backgrounds. Such an interdisciplinary inquiry attempts to further problematize and amplify the complexity and heterogeneity of immigrant women’s predicaments in re-fashioning a subjectivity as well as agency. The first analytical chapter elaborates Mena Alexander’s powerful narratives to articulate how the marginalization as an ethnic Other proves to be overpowering for the diasporic woman Sandhya Rosenblum. In analyzing Manhattan Music, I explore the ways the female body is in relation to memory and migration. The second analytical chapter on Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Mrs. Sen’s” and The Namesake delves into the indivisible correlations between immigrant women’s gendered bodies and foodways, elucidating how the culinary praxis as ritualized everyday activities elaborate the lives of subjugated and marginalized female subjects in diasporic contexts. The third chapter on Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine aims to explore the duality of Jasmine’s bodily submissiveness and subversiveness which coexist within Jasmine’s mobility out of necessity and ineluctability. That is to say, in defining her mobility, Jasmine’s body serves as a contested site exposing others’ predominance over it in both racial and gender terms, while also performing a kind of subversive resistance from within this power hierarchy. In the fourth analytical chapter on Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, I explore the relations between migrant women’s bodies and gendered notions of home and nationalism, highlighting the relationship between immigrant women’s formation of agency and their roles as economic migrants. To use the concept of a spectrum as a metaphor for South Asian immigrant women’s aesthetics of existence, the female protagonists, Sandhya, Mrs. Sen, Ashima, Jasmine and Nazneen, who appear in the dissertation, represent a gradual development towards self-assertion.