With its focus on immigration to the United States and development of American identity, Bharati Mukherjee’s fiction eludes literary categorization. It engages with the various contexts of multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and globalization, yet Mukherjee adamantly positions herself as an American author writing American literature. In this essay, I investigate the intersections between Mukherjee’s focus on the American character, culture, and people and developing theories and critical debates on globalization. Through Mukherjee’s works, we can see American identity in a state of flux, made possible by the immigrant and the relationships established between the transnational individual and America. Mukherjee’s immigrant characters challenge and expose American mythology from the American Dream of individual achievement to the canonical literature of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, rewriting them to show how foundational the immigrant is to American culture. I trace Mukherjee’s redefinition of the American character in and through three successive novels – Wife, Jasmine, and The Holder of the World. In Wife, Mukherjee challenges America’s adoption of multiculturalism because she considers it a means of essentializing ethnicity and both maintaining and enhancing difference. This multiculturalism, as part of America’s assumed principles of acceptance, alienates the protagonist Dimple from her immigrant community and the larger American culture, resulting in her violent attempts to force her Americanization. Jasmine continues to work against multiculturalism by explicitly inserting the immigrant into the American mythos, reshaping the Western literary canon to include the transnational individual and to assert the immigrant foundations of American ideology. Mukherjee expands her focus in Holder of the World as her protagonist Hannah travels to England, India, and the bourgeoning United States, rewriting The Scarlet Letter to suggest that globalizing forces have been present throughout American cultural history, not just at the end of the 20th century when critical debates began to flourish. Through analysis of these novels, I argue that Mukherjee’s reformulation of American character reasserts American ideals by including and developing with the rise of globalization theory.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 188-192).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Concordia University, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 138-151). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp05/NQ66691.pdf.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2003. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 188-192).

Thesis (M.A.)--Université de Sherbrooke, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Université de Sherbrooke, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references.

Latin America has been envisioned, time and again, as home to the semi-civilized. Or so (post)colonial imaginaries continue to impress upon us in developmental renderings of a New World that has yet to take off. Neither backward (in the ways of a ‘dark continent’) or advanced (as guaranteed by the status of a ‘first world’), its giants are, at best, chronically emerging. This in-between position is acutely exemplified by the Brazilian dilemma of an interminable modernization, responsibilized for curing all of our ills. The most wide-ranging projects of development are mobilized within this context, but the closer that we get to their distinct materializations, the more that they appear to us as mirages of what ought to be rather than what is, measured against the incorruptible standards of a modernity realized somewhere ‘out there’. In this study, I look to everyday dynamics in Brazil’s aspiring world-city, Rio de Janeiro, that compose the fields and subjects on which development projects operate, in turn revealing and obscuring ‘successes’, ‘failures’, and ultimately, assorted desires and expectations that (mis)lead a politics of transformation in the peripheries of the modern world. In Part III, I elaborate this history of the present as a way to reorient such grand narratives of arrested development, corruption, and other ‘third world’ problems, by drawing on a range of sites of sociability that nurture particular kinds of relations between (dis)obedient subjects and their governing institutions. To this end, I reconceive the terms of debate for thinking about places of an allegedly incomplete or corrupted modernity, in Part II, where I largely reframe the problems that a developmental ethos appropriates for itself, which situates the third world as the constitutive outside of idealized ways of living. By investigating the predominant developmental archetypes of the last century of Brazil’s promised take-offs, in Part I, I set up the pathways to decondition and recondition how we think about the limits and possibilities of a peripheral politics of transformation. In these ways, I conclude that the standards of political judgement that follow from such idealized ways of living neutralize contentions and negotiations over how we want to live, here and now, making way for confused desires, expectations, and responsibilities more in line with (inter)nationalist paradigms and prescriptions than the politics of everyday life in out of the way places. / Graduate / 0615 / 0616 / 0700 / andrea.b.gill@gmail.com

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / English / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

The dissertation seeks to newly conceptualize the situation of the Baltic post-war exile and the way it was reflected in the Lithuanian and Latvian novels through the lens of the postcolonial criticism. Forced emigration after the Second World War is related to cardinal changes, thus the following post-colonial concepts marking the shifts become the analytical instruments: liminality (V. Turner), hybridity and mimicry (H. Bhabha), imagined community (B. Anderson), nostalgia (S. Boym), and trickster (M. Bachtin). The analysis focuses around the Latvian and Lithuanian exile novels of the second half of the 20th century about war and life in exile written by the authors who suffered the same fate. The researcher uses a binary scheme of physical and mental colonization to consider the selected body of works. The chapter “Physical Colonization” analyzes war novels along the male/female gender lines. The “Mental Colonization” chapter explores works that reflect the scale of the survival strategies; the scale ranges from attachment to one‘s own culture to its voluntary renunciation. Three means of interface with the new countries stand out, which help to shed light onto the three stages of identity transformation of an emigrant, namely anti-colonization, hybridization, and self-colonization. The post-colonialism used in the analysis of Baltic novels and its proposed definitions proved to be functional and effective. The conclusion can be drawn that the emigration experience and... [to full text] / Disertacijoje naujai teoriškai konceptualizuojama baltų pokario išeivių bendruomenės situacija bei jos raiška lietuvių ir latvių romanuose. Prievartinė emigracija iš baltų kraštų po II pasaulinio karo susijusi su kardinaliomis permainomis, todėl analizės instrumentais tampa lūžį ir slinktis ženklinantys postkolonializmo konceptai: liminalumas (V. Turner), hibridiškumas ir mimikrija (H. Bhabha), įsivaizduojama bendruomenė (B. Anderson), nostalgija (S. Boym), triksteris (M. Bachtin). Analizės centre – latvių ir lietuvių XX a. II pusės egzodo romanai apie karą, pasitraukimą ir gyvenimą išeivijoje, sukurti rašytojų, kurie patys tą lemtį patyrė. Pasirinktų tekstų korpusui skvarbyti pasitelkiamas dvinaris fizinės ir mentalinės kolonizacijos modelis. „Fizinės kolonizacijos“ skyriuje analizuojami karo romanai pagal vyrų/moterų lyties skirtį. „Mentalinės kolonizacijos“ skyriuje tyrinėjami kūriniai, atspindintys išlikimo strategijas, kurios įvairuoja nuo prisirišimo prie savos kultūros iki savanoriško jos atsižadėjimo. Įžvelgiamos trys išeivio tapatybės transformacijos pakopos: antikolonizacija, hibridizacija, savikolonizacija. Baltų romanų analizei taikyta postkolonializmo metodologija, jos pasiūlytos sąvokos ir tipologizavimo modelis pasirodė funkcionalūs. Konstatuota, kad emigracinė patirtis ir tapatybės virsmai ne tiek pavaldūs etninei prigimčiai, kiek išgyvenami bendražmogiškai.