Rewriting paradigms of social and cultural identity: the new indian immigrant in bharati mukherjee’s fiction

Abstract

Social scientists have argued that identity is a socially constructed phenomenon, responsive to considerations of place, power, and circumstance. Bharati Mukherjee writes about what she calls the cultural hybridization of the new America and explores, in violent and often grotesque contexts, aspects of the collisions between the Indian and American cultures. Mukherjee sets her texts against a background of intertwined, transnational economic activities and mass uprootings in the Third World. In her fiction, Mukherjee presents a new view of postmodern, globalized America, in which the notion of the Indian immigrant as global cosmopolitan adds a transformative element to American multiculturalism.