Naming Jhumpa Lahiri: Canons and Controversies (review)

Naming Jhumpa Lahiri: Canons and Controversies explores the myriad ways that Jhumpa Lahiri is categorized in academic and commercial contexts. Since the publication of her debut short story collection Interpreter of Maladies (1999), Lahiri’s literature has been labeled and marketed as American, Indian American, Asian American, postcolonial, South Asian, Bengali, and global, to give a non-exhaustive list. The editors of Naming Jhumpa Lahiri, Lavina Dhingra and Floyd Cheung, set out to “nam[e] the canon or canons to which Lahiri’s texts belong,” but the collection ultimately proves the impossibility of this task, instead raising provocative questions about the functions of “naming”: “[W]hy does . . . naming matter? To what extent do academic categories and labels limit or expand our understanding of [literature?] . . . [How does] naming determine whether, and how, and by whom Lahiri’s texts are taught and read, and to which literary canons they belong?” (x, ix). Contributors emphasize Lahiri’s transcendence of literary categories as well as geographical borders, an idea well demonstrated by the range of authors she is linked to throughout the volume: Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldúa, Adrienne Rich, Jane Austen, Nikolai Gogol, Maxine Hong Kingston, Bharati Mukherjee, and Chitra Divakaruni, among others.

Lahiri has been labeled a “celebrity author,” winning the Pulitzer Prize (making her the first South Asian writer to receive the award) and the PEN/Hemingway Award for Interpreter, and acting alongside her parents and child in a 2006 motion picture adaptation of her novel The Namesake (2003). This widespread popularity is part of what makes “naming Lahiri” such a complex and contradictory process, one which is richly explored in the nine chapters following the introduction. Organized into three parts (“The Ethnic, The Orientalist, and/or The Universal?”; “Consuming Diaspora: Audience and Imaginary/Intimate Communities”; and “Gendered Ruptures and Familial Belongings”), these essays “negotiat[e] subtleties of categorization” in order to “do justice” to Lahiri as a “complex, transnational” writer (xvii). Questions of categorization and canonicity are the connecting thread throughout analyses of genre, gender, generations, and migrations. Mirroring Lahiri’s tendency to defy categorical limitations, many of the chapters resist the disciplinary boundaries of literary criticism, connecting Lahiri’s works to artistic, political, and historical contexts. The editors’ coauthored chapter on loss, melancholia, and compensation in The Namesake, for example, situates the novel within histories of Indian exclusion laws in America, examining the impact of the Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917 on migration and assimilation patterns for Indians coming to the US. Rajini Srikanth’s essay “What Lies Beneath: Lahiri’s Brand of Desirable Difference in Unaccustomed Earth” compares Lahiri’s stories to US “deployments” of Muslim American women as “spokespersons” for post-9/11 America, arguing that both represent “model[s] of successful citizenship . . . easily embraced by the majority group” (59). In an essay on the film version of Lahiri’s novel and the related art gallery Namesake/ Inspiration, Bakirathi Mani demonstrates that the “intertextual relationship between the literary, cinematic, and photographic” offers a better understanding of how narratives of South Asian migration circulate within US culture (75).

Individually, these chapters are engaging and worthwhile, but the collection as a whole is uneven. Much more attention is given to The Namesake than to either the Pulitzer Prize-winning Interpreter or Lahiri’s most recent collection, Unaccustomed Earth (2008). Throughout several chapters focused entirely or primarily on The Namesake, contributors give similar and often redundant plot summaries, and the same scenes and quotations are referenced repeatedly. In contrast, much of the discussion of Lahiri’s short stories treats them in groups, where each story is mentioned fleetingly. There are only two essays offering detailed and sustained analyses of some (but not all) of these stories—Susan Muchshima Moynihan’s chapter on Interpreter and Ambreen Hai’s essay on family formations in Unaccustomed Earth. In “Affect, History, and the Ironies of Community and Solidarity in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies,” Moynihan disputes the argument that Lahiri...