From the research that I have made, scholars and commentators who have
analyzed Lahiri‘s works mainly emphasize the importance of home to immigrants and the social meanings that it manifests. However, I seek to elaborate the correlation between American home and female Indian Americans by integrating Derridean hospitality and Irigaray‘s notion of the spatial third. Since many of her stories concern the interchanges between the host/hostess and the guest in the domain of home, Derrida‘s Self-Other negotiating hospitality unites the stories of Lahiri as a whole. I will explain the possibility of combining Lahiri‘s works and the Derridean hospitality in the following passage.
Immigrants who resettle to America from other countries could be compared to guests in the host country. They relocate to America and consider the possibility of accepting it as the second home. The seeming predicaments for immigrants are racism, alienation, adaptation problems, to name a few. Compared with male counterparts, female Indian immigrants undergo more serious and complicated adversities in the host country. Single or married female Indian immigrants come to the U.S. to seek for better life quality. Whether they are single businesswomen or married women who are capable of balancing between work and family care, they are expected by the families or Indian communities to place family matters as the top priority. As a consequence, they face multi-layered predicaments as immigrants, part from the host country and part from ethnic communities that impose gender identities upon them. That is to say, they are constrained within the sphere of home because of alienation from the host country and Indian patriarchal ideology. In the process of attempting to settle down
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and learning new language and culture, female Indian immigrants receive white Americans as guests in the domain of home. While they are the guests in the residence of the Indian hosts/hostesses, these white Americans represent the mainstream society.
Hence, they show up as the host/hostess of the adopted country and clash with ethnic immigrants in terms of religion, cultural and social values. Instead of fully accepting the immigrants, the white Americans are hostile to immigrants. Alienated as outsiders, the displaced immigrants seek for comfort and shelter in the American home that they establish. However, instead of a shelter, the home oppresses them because their subjectivity is constantly challenged by the visitation of the guest, in this context, the American culture epitomized by American white.
The descriptions of space, open or confined, tangible or intangible, often serve as metaphors to reflect the inner space of the main character. Moreover, in each of the three stories, home is not only the arena where the one who receives and the one who visits, but is also a symbolic cultural medium for the host and the guest to bridge cultural boundaries, whether the attempt is a success or a failure. Specifically, I want to stress the differences between social and cultural home. In the context of Lahiri‘s works, Indian immigrants relocate to America and create their American home in American society. Therefore, the American home is their social home that follows their social identity as immigrants and the Other that is deemed by the mainstream American culture. Nevertheless, having trouble being assimilated into American culture, they preserve some Indian traditions and values in their American home and are mentally attached to the Indian cultures. Their identifications with India with regard to ethnicity makes the country India as their cultural home. Their multi-layered identities affects their negotiation with the guest dramatically.
The theme of the cultural clash between Indians and Americans as well as the interplay between home, immigrant identity, and the guest recur in ―Interpreter of
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Maladies,‖ ―Mrs. Sen‘s,‖ and ―When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine.‖ I intend to expand the idea of home and identity by incorporating Derrida‘s notion of hospitality,
especially the negotiation between the host/hostess (the Self) and the guest (the Other) in the domain of home. These three stories discuss transcultural communication between female Indian American and guests from different cultural backgrounds in the realm of home. Moreover, in these stories, the guest culturally and socially challenges the host/hostess‘s subjectivity and reverses the host-guest status. The role-reversing process further blurs the Self-Other boundary and questions whether the host/hostess possesses the absolute sovereignty over the supposedly personal and private terrain of home. Such exploration of the concept of home, the multi-layered host-guest relations and the potentiality of the deconstruction of the home are the main concerns in the discourse of Derridean hospitality.
On the surface, they are the hosts/hostess of their home in the land of America.
That is to say, they build a place within a place that continues their Indian ways of life and welcomes guests from the mainstream American society. However, beneath the surface, the guest actually serves as the host/hostess of the country who poses hostile attitude to the outsider. In this sense, the guest challenges the host/hostess‘s
subjectivity and the existence of the place within a place. The encounter between the two thus leads to the role-reversing of the host and the guest, and the supposedly host/hostess becomes the cultural hostage of the new host. In the process of receiving guests, the host/hostess is so overwhelmed by the guest that the meaning of home blurs into an in-betweeness. However, due to perpetual host-guest hostility in the discourse of hospitality, I will incorporate Irigarayan hospitality and the creation of the spatial third to seek possibilities of cultural reconciliation in the process of host/hostess-guest interrogations in the terrain of home.
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