Mukherjee’s Narratives of Diaspora

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Between Mosaic and Melting Pot”: Negotiating Multiculturalism and Cultural Citizenship in Bharati Mukherjee’s Narratives of Diaspora Sharmani Patricia Gabriel, University of Malaya Bharati Mukherjee is an established, if not controversial, voice of the Indian diaspora in North America. Born into a Bengali-speaking, Hindu Brahmin family in Calcutta in 1940, Mukherjee left India for the University of Iowa in the United States of America in 1962 where she met and married the writer Clark Blaise. In 1966, she followed her husband to his ancestral home of Canada, where they lived, first in Toronto and then in Montreal, as citizens until 1980. In 1981, Mukherjee and her family left Canada to return to the US, residing in New York until the late 1980s, before the move to San Francisco, California, where she continues to live and work. Mukherjee became a naturalized US citizen in 1988. In a critical and creative career that has spanned over thirty years, Mukherjee has been engaged in redefining the idea of diaspora as a process of gain, contrary to conventional perspectives that construe immigration and displacement as a condition of terminal loss and dispossession, involving the erasure of history and the dissolution of an "original" culture. Concomitant with her literary and ideological reinscriptions of diaspora, Mukherjee has elected to describe herself as an "American" writer and has announced through various forums that it is the cultural narrative of America that has provided the enabling site for her own identity transformations as well as those she celebrates in her fictions. Her revisionary cultural politics has aroused considerable critical interest, itself a measure of the author's rising stature, and it is necessary at this stage to briefly gesture to the wider discourse of literary criticism in which Mukherjee is placed with a view to understanding

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