Negotiation in Diasporic Identity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Third and Final Continent and This Blessed House

Abstract

Nowadays diaspora becomes crucial issue once people actively involve in global world. In diasporic world, people inevitably engage with their new environment, adjust with the new life and adapt to the unaccustomed-yet habits. However, on the same time they will look back at their old homeland which is sometimes totally different from their new world. In that situation people will face the struggling condition to keep going with two different worlds by some process of negotiating, transforming, or even contesting. This paper aims at discussing the negotiation process experienced by the Asian Indian characters during their lives in America in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Third and Final Continent and This Blessed House. As one of the ethnic groups which has been scattering throughout global world, Asian Indian people endure the situation when they are in in-betweeness in their daily lives. The short stories, which are parts of Lahiri’s short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, concern mostly with the diasporic postcolonial topics. This paper draws the ideas of diaspora proposed by Steven Vertovec which mentions that diaspora can be as the type of consciousness, in which it is regarded as the dual or paradoxical nature. Through scrutinizing the wives and husbands characters in both short stories, the result shows that through some different ways, all the Asian Indian characters do both negotiation by adjusting to the new world--America, and old world--India. Both the Americaness and Indianess are reflected in their habits and apparatuses such as life styles, beliefs, foods, costumes, and others. The old world nostalgia, to which the characters feel deep meanings, have been created in some ways in their diasporic lives in the new world. Since the process of engaging two worlds is inherited through generations, the degree of in-betweeness is different among the characters. In The Third and Final Continent, since the characters can be categorized as the first generation of immigrant, their ties to the old world is bigger than those of the characters in This Blessed House. However, negotiation in diasporic life is a process, it may be different among persons, and it is fluid. Keywords : negotiation, diaspora, identity, old world, new world.