A language of her own : willful displacement and nomadic subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri
Abstract
In Other Words (2016) is the first of Jhumpa Lahiri’s writings to be published in Italian, charting the journey to self-expression enabled by her twenty-year relationship with this foreign language.Tracing Lahiri’s literary production, this article argues that the autobiographical prose of In Other Words is facilitated by a series of “willful” displacements, reworking and revising the notion of displacement, which is a pervasive theme of Lahiri’s earlier work. Moreover, it is precisely by means of these self-conscious geographical, bodily, linguistic, and literary dislocations that Lahiri articulates a kind of shifting or nomadic subjectivity, where otherness and multiplicity are re-privileged as sources of creative energy and self-affirmation.
Citation
Walker , R M 2021 , ' A language of her own : willful displacement and nomadic subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri ' , Contemporary Women's Writing , vol. 15 , no. 1 , pp. 105–122 . https://doi.org/10.1093/cww/vpab013
Publication
Contemporary Women's Writing
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1754-1476Type
Journal article
Collections
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