Bengali-American Fiction in Immigrant Identity Work

Abstract

In this article I focus on the reception and appropriation of three critically acclaimed, best-selling novels about Bengali-Americans by Bengali immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area. The three novels are: Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters (2002); Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Queen of Dreams (2004); and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2004). Using data from interviews and participant observation, I argue that questions concerning the reception of ethnic literature are inextricably linked with the processes of adaptation and identification. This article seeks to contextualize fiction by Bengali-Americans in relation to the continually debated issue of multicultural politics in the USA. The novels provide immigrants with appealing themes of nostalgia, empowerment, dissonance and self-determination to construct an internal ethnic identity. Immigrants actively use these themes to reconcile apparently contradictory impulses and to draw boundaries that safeguard their class privilege, assuage gender inequality and avoid racialization.

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