Jhumpa Lahiri’s Works in Transition: Towards a New Space

Critical discussions on Jhumpa Lahiri’s works are rampant, but they are confined to her short stories and fictional writings. This book offers a fresh perspective by showing how she gradually shifts her identity from a fiction writer to a non-fiction writer. And, more importantly, her adherence to the ’Italian phase’ in academia has not previously been the subject of such a thorough critical investigation. There is a sudden change in her writing and her choice of language; she prefers Italy and the Italian language to English and Bengali. Such spatial as well as linguistic dislocation leads her towards a new space in which she anticipates her freedom of choice, confronts difficulties, and often gets confused, too: to be in Italy or not to be.

What this book seeks to touch upon is how Lahiri’s fictional as well as nonfictional writings bring out her and her fictional characters’ translational and transnational existence reinforcing her literary motto ’I translate, therefore I am’.

It is of special interest to students as well as scholars of Diaspora and Migration studies.

Dr Auritra Munshi is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Raiganj University, West Bengal, India. He is co-editor of the book Border and Bordering: Politics, Poetics Precariousness (ibidem 2021). He has published many articles in international and national journals such as Indialogs: Spanish Journal Of India Studies, Postcolonial Interventions: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Muse India, Journal of the department of English: Vidyasagar University, Journal of Bodoland University and others. His interest includes South Asian diaspora, Coolie diaspora, Postcolonialism and subaltern studies