Venturing Out Diasporic Chronotope: A Feminist Perusal on Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth

Author(s) : Aqsa Arshad & Asifa Qasim

Abstract:

Within diasporic studies, the temporal magnitude has remained subaltern, together with the essence of spatial dissemination; mirroring female characters specifically. This paper is aimed at speculating the inescapable nexus of time and space in the fabrication and refabrication of feminist diasporic apprehension in Lahiri’s title story “Unaccustomed Earth” and the subsequent story “Hell-Heaven”. Delineating on, Chronotope (Bakhtin, 1937), particularly in Diaspora literature (Clifford, 1994), the study unfolds, in the selected data, the ideology of ‘diaspora antecedents’ as prognosticated on elimination, not merely from a specific spatial position and temporal juncture but also in addition to the time and space-specific social activity by which a society conceptualizes its terrains and positions itself within them. Governing through the discourses of displacement of the rendered locality, employing the methodology of descriptive text analysis the evaluation demonstrates that the writer creates substituting archives, utilizing the Postcolonial Feministic lens (Ashcroft, 1989). The findings suggest that the intriguing intricacies of Lahiri’s diasporic discourses, examined by analyzing lexical stretches, elucidated that the text construes the sociocultural diasporic identity. The findings also provide insightful incarnations for chronotopicality based on qualitative analysis by contributing explorations of gynocentric identity (Showalter, 1986). And, ultimately, it is deduced that the text is mirroring the social and cultural aspects of life, which deal with the position of diasporic women in a Neo-colonial timeframe.
Keywords: Feminism, diaspora, chronotope, Colonialism, fiction, Bakhtin, identity, Neo-colonial