Thinking Global? Local Globalisms and Global Localisms in the Writing of Jhumpa Lahiri

Abstract

This paper explores the reconfigurations of transnational urbanism in the texts of Jhumpa Lahiri. It argues that diasporic narratives become imaginary homelands articulating the tensions between the local and the global. Lahiri?s fictions allow the re-imagining of the connection with the ?lost country? and the process of reconstructing the ?self? in any location.
Across these fictions there exists a constant dialogue between the interior and the exterior, where the dynamics of the outside world are expressed through the enactment of ?the cultural practices of everyday life? (Appadurai). This process manifests itself through a duality which sees the parents preserving the traditional and the local within the home and the children embracing the global in the outside world.
This process will be analysed in The Namesake (2003), drawing on further support from Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008). As a second generation South Asian diasporic writer ?growing up in a vacuum culture?, Lahiri best exemplifies ?the race to occupy the space of the hyphen? between India and America, ?the problematic situating of the self as simultaneously belonging here and there? (Mishra). In this work, Calcutta and New York constitute important dimensions of reference by finding their locatedness in the text itself.
The accounts of the Indian parents and Indian-American children correspond to the heterogeneous composition of a diasporic existence, the tendency to express global and self-belonging in the form of local globalisms and global localisms. In Lahiri?s fiction, first generations tend to sanitise the Indian culture and delocalise it, while second generations are often charged with the task of localising their existence within a global environment.