Lexington Books
Pages: 238
•
978-0-7391-6997-1 • Hardback • December 2011 • $121.00 • (£93.00)
978-0-7391-7587-3 • Paperback • March 2012 • $54.99 • (£42.00)
978-0-7391-6998-8 • eBook • December 2011 • $52.00 • (£40.00)
Editors:
Lavina Dhingra is Professor of English at Bates College, and has served as Faculty Associate Dean of Admissions from 2006-2009. She is the contributing co-editor of A Part, Yet Apart: South Asians in Asian America (Temple University Press, 1998) and is completing a book manuscript on South Asian American women's literature. She has published wide-ranging essays on South Asian American issues including interviews with Ved Mehta and Meena Alexander, articles in Amerasia, Journal of Asian American Studies, Hitting Critical Mass, and several essay collections and biographical encyclopedias. She teaches courses in Asian American women writers, filmmakers, and critics, Indian diasporic literature, modern British literature, reading and writing lyric poetry, and feminist literary criticism, among others. She has chaired several MLA committees and has served as the President of the South Asian Literary Association.
Floyd Cheung is Associate Professor of English and of American Studies at Smith College. He is also a member of the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Certificate Program, for which he served as the founding chair. Interested in the recovery of early Asian American texts, he has edited H. T. Tsiang’s novels And China Has Hands (Ironweed Press, 2003) and The Hanging on Union Square (Kaya Press, 2012) and co-edited Kathleen Tamagawa’s memoir, Holy Prayers in a Horse’s Ear (Rutgers University Press, 2008). He is the contributing co-editor of Recovered Legacies: Authority and Identity in Early Asian American Literature (Temple University Press, 2005). His essays on Asian American literature have appeared in various edited collections as well as journals including a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, New Centennial Review, TDR, and Studies in Travel Writing.
Contributors:
Karen M. Cardozo, Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt, Ambreen Hai, Bakirathi Mani, Susan Muchshima Moynihan, Rani Neutill, Rajini Srikanth
Introduction: Naming Jhumpa Lahiri: Bengali, Asian American, Postcolonial, Universal
Lavina Dhingra, Bates College, and Floyd Cheung Smith College
Part 1: The Ethnic, the Orientalist, and/or the Universal?
Chapter 1: Mediating the Particular and the General: Ethnicity and Intertextuality in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Oeuvre
Karen Cardozo,Five Colleges, Inc.
Chapter 2: The Inheritance of Postcolonial Loss, Asian American Melancholia, and Strategies of Compensation in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake
Floyd Cheung, Smith College, and Lavina Dhingra, Bates College
Chapter 3: What Lies Beneath: Lahiri’s Brand of Desirable Difference in Unaccustomed Earth
Rajini Srikanth, University of Massachusetts Boston
Part 2: Consuming Diaspora: Audience and Imaginary/Intimate Communities
Chapter 4: Novel/Cinema/Photo: Intertextual Readings of The Namesake
Bakirathi Mani, Swarthmore College
Chapter 5: Affect, History, and the Ironies of Community and Solidarity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies
Susan Muchshima Moynihan, State University of New York at Buffalo
Chapter 6: Intimate Awakening: Jhumpa Lahiri, Diasporic Loss, and the Responsibility of the Interpreter
Rani Neutill, Johns Hopkins University
Part 3: Gendered Ruptures and Familial Belongings
Chapter 7: Feminizing Men?: Moving Beyond Asian American Literary Gender Wars in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Fiction
Lavina Dhingra, Bates College
Chapter 8: Gendered (Be)Longing: First- and Second-Generation Migrants in the Works of Jhumpa Lahiri
Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt, Linfield College
Chapter 9: Re-Rooting Families: The Alter/Natal as the Central Dynamic of Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth
Ambreen Hai, Smith College
This timely volume expands our understanding of Jhumpa Lahiri’s universe by engaging the ways she creates spaces where identities shift and coalesce in unexpected but surprisingly true ways. The thoughtful essays tease out the ways narrative form and structure reflect the creative intelligence that produces works of art. Congratulations to the editors for a superb collection!
— Rocío G. Davis, professor of English, City University of Hong Kong
This dynamic first collection on Lahiri’s fiction addresses accepted, conflicting, and evolving definitions about family, nationality, home, ethnic-global movement, and canonicity that her work and literary popularity raise. Its scholarly alliances and divergences guarantee that it will continue to provoke such necessary debate.
— Monica Chiu, University of New Hampshire