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After Melancholia.
A Reappraisal of Second-Generation Diasporic Subjectivity in the Work
of Jhumpa Lahiri.
Delphine Munos
Rodopi Amsterdam/New York, NY 2013. XLIV, 237 pp. (Cross/Cultures 169)
ISBN: 978-90-420-3740-3
ISBN: 978-94-012-0991-5
Online info: http://www.rodopi.nl/senj.asp?BookId=CC+169
Mindful of the tunnel vision sometimes created by the privileging of
'hybridity talk' and matters of culture in discussions of texts by
minority writers, Delphine Munos in After Melancholia reads the work
of the Bengali-American celebrity author Jhumpa Lahiri against the
grain, by shifting the ground of analysis from the cultural to the
literary. With the help of psychoanalytic theories ranging from
Sigmund Freud through André Green and Nicolas Abraham to Jean
Laplanche, this study re-evaluates the complexity of Lahiri's craft
and offers major insights into the author's representation of
second-generation diasporic subjectivity - an angle hitherto neglected
by critics working from the narrower theoretical boundaries of
transnationalism, diaspora studies, postcolonial theory, and
Asian-American studies alike. Via interdisciplinary incursions into
the domains of literary and psychoanalytic criticism, as well as into
those of trauma and diaspora studies, Munos takes up "Hema and
Kaushik," the triptych of short stories included in Unaccustomed Earth
(2008), as exemplary texts in which Lahiri redefines notions of
belonging and arrival regarding the Bengali-American second
generation, not in terms of cultural assimilation - which would hardly
make sense for characters born in the USA in the first place - but in
terms of a resymbolization of the gaps in the parents' migrant
narratives. Munos' in-depth reading of Lahiri's trilogy is concerned
with exploring how "Hema and Kaushik" signifies on the absent
presences haunting transgenerational relationships within the US
diasporic family of Bengali descent. Bringing to the forefront such
'negative' categories as the gap, the absent, the unsaid, the
melancholically absented mother, After Melancholia reveals that the
second-generation 'Mother Diaspora' is no less haunting than her
first-generation counterpart, 'Mother India'. Calling for a
re-assessment of Lahiri's work in terms of a dialectical relationship
between (transgenerational) mourning and melancholia, Munos provides a
compelling reading grid by means of which underrepresented aspects of
the rest of Lahiri's work, especially her novel The Namesake (2003),
gain new visibility.
Delphine Munos is a F.R.S.-FNRS postdoctoral researcher in the
Department of English and American Literatures at the University of
Liège (Belgium). She has published in the fields of American and
postcolonial literature, diaspora studies, and South Asian studies.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
Introduction
Diaspora's Hereafters
Speaking from the End of the Line
Imagining Entangled Genealogies
Reaching Out Beyond Diaspora
Performing the Phantom Loss of the Motherland
Revenant Melancholy
Firing the Loaded Gun
Unassimilable Death: A History of Transgenerational Entanglement
Home Is Where the Haunt Is
The Return of the Dead Buried Within the Other
Kaushik's Melancholic Crime
Kaushik's Exile of Self
Kaushik's Impossible Memory, or the Unreliable Narrator
Dead Mothers and Hauntings
Gothicized Repetitions and Haunted Beginnings
The Phantom, or Hema's Intention
The Other Dead Mother
The Future of Diaspora
Afterwardsness, or the Possibility of Translating Oneself into the Future
Rome: The Postal Effect
Hema's Failed Translations
Kaushik's Failed Repression
Claiming the Mother's Luggage
Into the Maternal Necropolis: A History of Guilt
The Ending as True Beginning
Conclusion
Works Cited
Index
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