"A Betrayal of Everything": The Law of the Family in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland

Abstract

This article argues that Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland (2013) challenges a dominant narrative of Asian American family immigration and upward mobility through the disavowal of reproductive labor. Ratified by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the family unit has become a powerful nexus of domestic feeling and national assimilation in narratives about "good" immigrants, often functioning as a biopolitical imperative for hyperproductivity. In Lahiri's latest novel, the Mitra family's westward migration precipitates the replacement of reproductive labor with intellectual labor that irrevocably changes the immigrant family unit and renovates the heterofuturist directives of American immigration policy.

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