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Diasporic Consciousness is a complex term as it encompasses ideas including exilic existence, a sense of loss, consciousness of being an outsider, yearning for home, burden of exile, dispossession and relocation. The lives of immigrants do not have straight lines. They live centuries of history in a life lifetime and have several lives and roles. They experience a sense of uprootedness in the host countries. Inspite of their attempts of acculturation, they do remain at the periphery and are treated as others. “Migrants,” says Salman Rushdie, “…straddle two cultures … fall between two stools” and they suffer “a triple disruption” comprising the loss of roots, the linguistic and also the social dislocation.” (279) Trishanku, the character from the Indian epic Ramayana, who went embodied to heaven but had to settle at a place midway between the earth and the paradise, serves as metaphor for the modern expatriate inhabiting the contested global local space.
For a comparative study, on the treatment of the theme of diasporic consciousness in both these novels, the paper portrays the differences present in the novels regarding the setting and background, types and phases of migration and the techniques employed by the novelists.
“Boast of Quietness”, a poem by Jorge Luis Borges serves as a fitting epigraph for The Inheritance of Loss. The poem speaks of loss, of universal human feelings and of the difficulties in achieving self- contentment. The novel also meditates on loss as an emotional location. A retired, reclusive Judge, Jemubhai Patel lives with his orphaned granddaughter Sai, his beloved dog Mutt and his cook Panna Lal in Cho Oyu, a crumbling house in Kalimpong. Lack of human warmth, love of family is the loss in the Jemu’s l...
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...novelists have presented a realistic and touching picture of the palpable life of the Diasporas, who are on a river with a foot each in two different boats, and each boat trying to pull them in separate directions. But every coin has two sides to it. It is an enriching experience if taken in a positive way. Being an immigrant teaches them much about the world and about human beings. It enlarges their consciousness about things which they would never have understood if born and raised in one place. It enables them to speak concretely on a subject of universal significance and appeal.
Works Cited
Desai, Kiran. The Inheritance of Loss. New Delhi: Penguin, 2006.
Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Namesake. NewDelhi: HarperCollins, 2003.
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Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism London : Granta, 1991.
Hall, S. (1995). Diasporas. from "routes" to roots (pp. 427-428). new york: oxford university press.
From the beginning of the story, a dreary gray New York is painted in one's mind with a depressing saddened tone of the bustling metropolis. It is a city flooded with immigrant workers hoping to better their lives and their c...
This poem captures the immigrant experience between the two worlds, leaving the homeland and towards the new world. The poet has deliberately structured the poem in five sections each with a number of stanzas to divide the different stages of the physical voyage. Section one describes the refugees, two briefly deals with their reason for the exodus, three emphasises their former oppression, fourth section is about the healing effect of the voyage and the concluding section deals with the awakening of hope. This restructuring allows the poet to focus on the emotional and physical impact of the journey.
...own unless they are remembered, until they are brought back into waking life and understood by the individual as memories, separated from the present. “Thus they lead one to cultural travel, to reminisce the culture of origin, the displaced space and time. They help soothe the pains of loneliness, thereby giving succor to survive in an alien land. Secondly, to survive in the foreign land the expatriates create an ambience there by establishing their own ghetto, celebrating their festivals, dining together or holding community feasts, sharing cultural markers, frequenting to the house of their colour and little socializing with the dominant group. Thus they create an ‘alternative world’ in their present world. These expatriates ignore the subtle desire to merge among the majority, oppose the willingness of their children to a just to and accept the dominate culture.
Throughout the novels Brooklyn and The Translator the idea of a common theme of the home arises and is a reason for much elaboration and discussion. The idea of home, leaving home, and returning home is rather important point for the paper. Home means something very different to Eilie and Daoud and how issues such as immigration/emigration, exile, and going back home play out in the narrative. Although they are in two different time periods in history and are on opposite sides of the world where the cultures could not be any more different, this essay has taken examples from the text to examine. these two characters and their involvement with the concept of the home.
The interpretation of the new is a major factor which influences one’s travel through a journey and ultimately effects the outcome of it. Skrzyneki effectively demonstrates the interpretation of journey through the use of symbol title, and repetition in Ancestors, and Feliks Skrzynecki. Journey has also effectively been depicted in Kelley’s Language Barrier. The major theme of migration has successfully described journey, and the interpretation of it.
Knott , Kim, and Seán McLoughlin, eds. Diasporas Concepts, Intersections, Identities. New York : Zed Books, 2010. Print.
...de effects of ‘nontraditional’ immigration, the government officially turned against its immigrant communities…” In this line, Mukherjee is showing that she had also been a victim of the new immigration laws, and that was the reason she had conformed to the country, in order to feel a sense of belonging. In this instance, exemplification is used to develop her argument in an effective manner that causes the audience to feel a sense of guilt and even listen to her argument.
The changing environments throughout the ages have caused the movement of thousands of families out of their homelands. Whether forced to make such decisions or doing so by their own desires, all immigrants have had to survive the physical and psychological challenges encountered along the way. To speak about the experiences of all these different people using the same ideas and examples would be quite inaccurate. They all, however, had to live through similar situations and deal with similar problems. Many of them succeeded and found the better future they were looking for. Many others found only hardship and experienced the destruction of their hopes and dreams. All of them were transformed.
This research study focuses at negotiating the shifting identities of immigrants and their traumas in postcolonial literature with reference to Lahiri’s fiction. The suffering of every immigrant in achieving a shelter and identity in a foreign land often leads to loss of identity. The qualms, agitation and nervousness of immigrants often increase the issues of identity, and immigrants often feel alienated in the midst of exotic land, they even start to think about achieving new identities. Stuart Hall (1987) a famous cultural theorist discusses the issues of cultural identity and migration as he says “Migration is a one way trip. There is no “home” to go back to”. Change in the place and ambience totally change the circumstances in the lives of immigrants in Lahiri’s fiction, they often try to cling to their own cultural identity and costumes. But the cultural effect is often so strong that it deeply affects the identity of immigrants and they ultimately try to change their identities. Immigrants make an absurd attempt to get mingled in the culture of foreign country. Hall discusses “Cultural identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (235).
Migration of the human population began over a million years ago beginning in Africa and later across Asia and Europe. Since the beginning of human existence, migration has continued through both voluntary migration within one’s country or elsewhere and through involuntary migration, which includes the slave trade and human trafficking. The movement of labor to capital can simply illustrate modern migration, in its purest form. Because of the constant migration of humans across the globe, the assimilation of many cultures was forced. This in turn led to inherent problems such as cultural alienation and cultural fragmentation to exist within society. In each of the short stories, “One Out of Many” written by Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul and “The Old Chief Mshlanga” written by Nobel laureate Doris Lessing, the authors are able to successfully express the subject matter of cultural alienation and fragmentation through careful analysis of class and race in each of the stories respective societies.
The story “All Summer in a Day” and the excerpt from “Immigrants” are similar in many ways. Immigration takes place in both texts. In “All Summer in a Day”, Margot and her
The poem “Minority” written by Imtiaz Dharker uses contrasts in imagery and a change in point of view in order to convey the “foreigner” (1) and the message to “you” (44). The opening line of the poem introduces its theme of separation and otherness. The poem begins “I was born a foreigner” (1) using the 1st person point of view to present a personal feeling that is internal. The first line of the poem leads to the fact that the speaker was born in a country different from their origin. After the first line the speaker in the poem seems to belong nowhere – “even in the place/planted with my relatives” (4-5) leading to believe that the speaker is “a foreigner everywhere” (3). The speaker’s choice of words makes us feel that no matter where the speaker goes she always seems to be separated. The speaker returns to the country of her parents and still continues to feel like a foreigner. The speaker in this situation feels displaced and victimized because she find themselves facing prejudice from the country she was born in as well as the country of her relatives and family. This stanza solely serves to single the speaker who can be concluded as the “foreigner” (1) out as a lone individual rather than a representation of an entire group. The speaker’s repetition of “foreigner” (3) throughout the poem emphasizes her isolation from her own family as well as “All kinds of places and groups” (9). The speaker tells us “I don’t fit” (13) where she is comparing herself to “food cooked in milk of coconut/where you expected ghee or cream” (15-16) or an “unexpected aftertaste/ of cardamom or neem” (17-18). The use of taste to describe a feeling of being foreign is evocative because a countries cuisine is a compliment of its culture so it is inte...
The concept of orientalism refers to the western perceptions of the eastern cultures and social practices. It is a specific expose of the eurocentric universalism which takes for granted both, the superiority of what is European or western and the inferiority of what is not. Salman Rushdie's Booker of the Bookers prize winning novel Midnights Children is full of remarks and incidents that show the orientalist perception of India and its people. It is Rushdie's interpretation of a period of about 70 years in India's modern history dealing with the events leading to the partition and beyond. Rushdie is a fantasist and a creator of alternate realities, the poet and prophet of a generation born at the degree zero of national history. The present paper is an attempt to study how Salman Rushdie, being himself a writer of diasporic consciousness, sometimes perceives India and its people as orientalist stereotypes and presents them in a derogatory manner.
V. S. Naipaul, the mouthpiece of displacement and rootlessness is one of the most significant contemporary English Novelists. Of Indian descent, born in Trinidad, and educated in England, Naipaul has been placed as a rootless nomad in the cultural world, always on a voyage to find his identity. The expatriate sensibility of Naipaul haunts him throughout his fiction and other works, he becomes spokesman of emigrants. He delineates the Indian immigrant’s dilemma, his problems and plights in a fast-changing world. In his works one can find the agony of an exile; the pangs of a man in search of meaning and identity: a dare-devil who has tried to explore myths and see through fantasies. Out of his dilemma is born a rich body of writings which has enriched diasporic literature and the English language.