A Complex Identarian Journey Away from English: The Case of Jhumpa Lahiri

Abstract

Since her arrival on the global literary scene in 1999, Jhumpa Lahiri remained in the league of the metaphorical postmodern, postcolonial2, transnational3and diasporic writers’ club.Though, in her works, she draws attention to the concepts of hybrid identities4
, however, she also found herself increasingly confined within this identity. This realisation amongst others made her wonder if ‘diasporic transnationalism’5 was set aside for writers with a foreign origin. In 2015, Lahiri shocked her readers by proclaiming in a New Yorker piece called “Teach Yourself Italian” that she was no longer reading in English and was progressively trying to write in a foreign language, Italian. In the process, she was probably trying to break free from the limiting framework of the ‘confining identity’. In this paper, I examine the New Yorker piece to assess if, in the act of deliberate movement, she managed to escape the confines of her
hyphenated literary identity.