Women’s Roles in Negotiating Diasporic Identity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unnaccustomed Earth and Only Goodness

Abstract

Today diaspora becomes highligthed issue when people become parts of global world. The term of diapora cannot be separated from old world/new world, past/present, or rooted/uprooted. In a diaporic position, people usually face a condition of in-betweeness, the situation between the homeland where they come from and that of the new land where they have to live today. By using Vertovec’s ideas which suggests diaspora as type of consciousness, this paper intends to discuss women’s roles in diasporic world experienced by the Asian-Indian female characters in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unnaccustomed Earth and Only Goodness. As one of the diasporic ethnic groups in the world, Asian Indian women encounter paradoxical nature, the situation in which they have to adapt to the new environment but on the other side they still maintain their old habits. Languages, beliefs, traditions, costums, and foods become the apparatuses that the women use as the negotiation tools between old world and new world. By focusing on these women’s roles, this paper depicts how these female characters still maintain the Indian values yet on the occasion also adopt the American’s. On each generation, the in-betweenness situation is different. The efforts of maintaining old world tradition may react the resistance from the latter generation. However, in both short stories, Lahiri reveals the the importance of maintaining the old world. In her ways, she appreciates the maintaining old world values among the Americans’. Keywords : diaspora, identity, old world, new world