Migration and hybridity: Stereoscopic vision in the novels of Rushdie, Mukherjee, and Ghosh.

摘要

This thesis analyzes migrant fictions written by three Indian-English writers who examine both the difficulties and the prospects of displacement by presenting characters that undergo radical changes in their sense of space, social identifications, self and body image as a result of movement. It is founded on the argument that the plurality in a migrant's experience endows her with multiple subject positions that can negotiate contradicting cultural discourses. Hybridity, which signifies the embodiment of multiple subject positions and cultural belongings, provides an energy field of differences out of which creativity and resistance to master narratives of dominant cultures emerge. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie uses the themes of metamorphosis and monstrosity to illuminate the corporeal and mental transformations a migrant undergoes. Rushdie proposes hybridity as a means of agency and resistance for racialized and even demonized migrants. Jasmine by Bharati Mukherjee portrays gendered travel through the life of a woman migrant whose mobility and multiple subject positions provide a resistance to dominations exercised on her gendered and racialized body. The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh argues that socio-cultural spaces, like migrant identities, are hybrid realms in which the lines between Self and Other, here and there, past and present are blurred. In all three texts, the presence of migrant characters forces the metropolis and its residents to not only encounter Otherness but also to discover the Other within, a recognition of difference which must ideally give way to tolerance.