Disjunctures and diaspora in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss

Abstract

In The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai juxtaposes underprivileged diasporic subjects in India and the USA in both the colonial past and the global present, thereby challenging its readers to develop a larger perspective on historical and global power asymmetries and minority struggles for recognition. She uses a fragmentary structure that shifts across time and space to suggest that immigration and diaspora are predicated on a rift between home and host land. I argue that in her novel, diaspora represents both a socio-political formation and a narrative strategy that underscores socio-economic inequalities in the world and invites readers to think critically about immigration and global capitalism. In blending aesthetic and material concerns, Desai departs from theories of diaspora and cosmopolitanism that tend to privilege hybridity and mobility. By narrating the experiences of cross-ethnic diasporas in the context of global capitalism, Desai expands the generic boundaries of Indian diasporic writing in English.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.