Roger F Malina brainstorm Aug 19 2024
This morning Swati Anwesha walked into our ArtSciLab; she is a PhD student in literature, and originally from India.
When we started working together, she was working on a novel, pretending to be “Charles Dickens”; It was to be a new “tale of two cities’. She had lived through the Covid pandemic both in India and Texas and was analogizing.
We started discussing the concept of ‘diasporas’ since she was part of an Indian diaspora to Texas; no one planned it. Plano is now a majority of people born in India. Our JSOM business school is filled with Indian students in Data Analytics (setting up start up companies on line back in India).
Swati recommends the author Jhumpa Lahiri Ashu Rani to me, details at end of this blog. I learned the term “diasporic writings”
But
The number of Indian students in our university is now dropping. Maybe the phenomenon was caused by the Covid 19 pandemic, and Texas dealt with the pandemic better than India; so Indian middle class parents sent their juniors to UTDallas. Or ? what causes and or cancel’s diasporas ( waves of migration). I am sure there is a huge literature.
As a founding co-member of our Center for Emergence Studies, it occurs to me that waves of diasporas are one way that things emerge in our societies. I need to read up on it.
I wrote previously on A Hybrid Professional’s duty to Migrant Ancestors:
A Hybrid Professional’s duty to Migrant Ancestors
Where I recounted how one side of my family had diaspora ’ed back and from Bohemia, now the Czech republic, to Texas and back again.
We live in a Texan culture where immigrants are vipers and to be killed at the border or inside.
So lets leave it at that, for now. Problematic Identity in the diasporic writings of Jhumpa Lahiri Ashu Rani and Dr. Garima DOI: https://doi.org/10.33545/26648717.2022.v4.i2a.87 Abstract In this paper, Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake’s characters of Indian descent and immigrants in the United States are examined in relation to their name problems, sense of identity, and sense of belonging. Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake is a poignant portrayal of the struggles of the BengaliAmerican diaspora, as well as the complexities of identity and belonging that arise as a result of displacement. Through the lens of the Ganguli family, Lahiri explores how their experiences of migration and adaptation in the United States affect their sense of self and their connection to their cultural heritage. The Namesake is the idea of a problematic identity, which arises when individuals in the diaspora are caught between two cultures and struggle to reconcile their cultural heritage with the demands and expectations of their new environment. Through her depiction of these characters and their experiences, Lahiri highlights the challenges of navigating multiple cultural identities and the tensions that can arise as a result. She also shows how these challenges can lead to a sense of alienation and dislocation, as well as a profound longing for connection and a sense of belonging.