engleski

Uncanny Domesticity in Contemporary American Fiction: The Case of Jhumpa Lahiri

John Carlos Rowe in his recent article notes a process of “hypernationalization” of the uncontainable material that from the outside assails the American “homeland.” In short he characterizes this strategy as bringing the world back to America, as it were scaling it back to America's size. Whatever the case with the popular cultural products (Hollywood blockbusters, TV series, and the like), recent US fiction defies and undercuts the idea of normalizing the numerous risks of globalization. The appropriate case study is encapsulated in the work of Jhumpa Lahiri, leading the latest wave of US fiction writers that engage with instances of the uncanny at the heart of the American familiar, domestic, and middle-class spaces. Lahiri, in her novels and short story collections ranging from the highly acclaimed Interpreter of Maladies to more recent Unaccustomed Earth, presents subtle incursions of foreignness into seemingly well-ordered, homely, secure and manageable domestic spaces. This interruption is in Lahiri's work often signalled by her immigrant characters (despite their being presumably well adjusted), their family or personal history that intrudes upon the apparent American lack of history, by the violent political or social upheavals of the Third World that nevertheless haunt her character in their First World settings. Moreover, she often unlocks the family and personal stories that show an inextricable connection between the domestic and the foreign, while registering how the global imbricates the domestic (American) space. In that sense Lahiri might be said to be contributing to what Caren Irr has recently termed the geopolitical novel. Thus it is my aim to consider the instances of, what I would like to term “uncanny domesticity” in some of Lahiri's works.

Jhumpa Lahiri, the uncanny, domestic, immigrant

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