Gender, globalization and beyond in Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies
This thesis explores two major concepts: globalization and diaspora and their impact on the literary representation of women in Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of short stories The Interpreter of Maladies and Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Tropic of Orange. In the first chapter, using Vijay Mishra’s theory on the Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary, the thesis examines the diasporic state of Mrs. Sen through Mishra’s notion of “impossible mourning”. I juxtapose Mrs. Sen’s character to two other female characters to argue that mobility and crossing borders do not affect all women equally, especially if they come from different social class and caste backgrounds. In addition, I compare Mrs. Sen’s diasporic condition to her husband’s to contend that the impact of immigration is more beneficial to him than her. This thesis, hence, rethinks some of the reasons why people migrate across the world and its various impacts on individuals, especially women whose displacement often curtails rather than expands their mobility, freedom and independence. In the second chapter, therefore, I use Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s Feminism without Borders to highlight the difference between Western women and so-called Third World women. Furthermore, using Mohanty’s essay “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited,” which condemns the detrimental effects of capitalism and globalization and promotes an anti-capitalist and anti-global project based on solidarity, I study the characterization of Emi and Rafaela, two central characters of Yamashita’s novel, within the context of globalization and its deviant operations. Referring to the criminal and criminalizing operative modes of global capitalism, including organ and sex trafficking, deviant globalization is a critical concept in this thesis through which I read Yamashita’s novel and its female characters’ complicity with and resistance to global capitalism.
Globalization Diaspora Gender Borders Mobility Deviant globalization Feminism Solidarity Genre