Paper short abstract:

The paper explores how Geetanjali Shree’s Khali Jagah (2006) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (2008) converge in the use of highly interiorized characterization to represent the intrusion of the global in personal lives, thus undermining stereotypes of cultural identities.

Paper long abstract:

Geetanjali Shree's Khali Jagah (2006) and Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth (2008) are almost contemporary, but originate from totally different literary contexts. They seem to converge in their use of a highly personalized, interiorized narration and characterization to relate the intrusion of political violence, migration, displacement and other global events in personal lives. Khali Jagah is more radical in the sense that it stretches the possibilities of speech and characterization to relate the coming to terms with the loss of offspring as a result of a terrorist attack. Lahiri's fiction subtly personalizes the diaspora experience migration, innovating and extending the palette of 'migration' fiction with an individualized psychological dimension.

The paper analyses how the two authors, each in their own manner, relate the experience of globalisation in a local, personal space that is not primarily defined by cultural identifications. Is this 'glocalized' literary idiom in writing coming from or related to South Asia superseding existing modes of representation of the postmodern experience, such as Bhabha's 'hybridity'?