Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Blank Spaces: Outdated Maps and Unsettled Subjects in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies

2016; Oxford University Press; Volume: 41; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/melus/mlw004

1946-3170

Keith Wilhite,

American and British Literature Analysis

This essay explores how maps frame the cultural struggle with identity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies . A distinguished body of scholarship already exists on diaspora, hybridity, and postcolonialism in Lahiri’s writing, and this analysis borrows from those studies while shifting attention to the way the stories deploy maps as a field of exchange—both between viewers and the various cartographic representations they encounter --and between the characters who participate in the stories’ impromptu geography lessons. In this context, “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine” and “Sexy” should be read as allegories of cultural belonging in which Lahiri transfers preoccupations with displacement to her unsettled US subjects: Lilia, a second-generation Indian American, and Miranda, a Midwesterner relocated to the Northeast. Each narrative turns on the exchanges that take place between these characters and the maps they confront, prompting the reader to see how these representations frame questions about the social construction of place and identity. Lahiri’s stories demonstrate how maps privilege the colonizing conception of “blank spaces,” but also how maps—especially outdated maps—posit the fundamentally unsettled identity of global subjects who feel simultaneously out-of-place and at-home. In “Mr. Pirzada” and “Sexy,” outdated maps configure the complex interactions among race, gender, and geography that constitute contemporary global subjectivity.