Cultural Negotiation of Immigrants in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Narratives

Abstract

This article analyzes the cultural negotiation and identity formation of immigrant characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s narratives. In the transcultural space of diaspora, the immigrant characters often vacillate between cultural practices of their home and host country problematizing their cultural identity. They can neither forsake their past: cultural origin nor fully emerge into the cultural practices of their host country. They tend to adopt the new cultural identity without leaving the old one. In a sense, they occupy a shared cultural space of their host and home country rendering cultural ambivalence. Such cultural negotiations lead them to the third space: hybrid cultural space which renders new form of fluid and dynamic cultural identity that transcends the binary of the past and present, and home country and host country. Formation of such unstable cultural identity of immigrants is examined in the critical frame of Stuart Hall’s cultural identity and Homi K Bhabha’s third space in this article.