Urban and Rural Narratives of Female Relocation in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Novels Queen of Dreams and The Mistress of Spices

• Autorzy: Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru
• Języki publikacji: EN

Abstrakty

EN

In today’s global world, the urban/ rural opposition is increasingly becoming a more relevant marker of the acculturation of foreigners whose adoption of national values is reflected by the spaces they inhabit. As they bring with them traditions related to the healing and balancing forces of the earth, immigrants prompt a reconsideration of the urban/ rural dichotomy in the metropolitan spaces they come to inhabit. Rural landscape in American culture has a long tradition of acting as a source of an alternative symbolic imaginary, responsible for boosting people’s feelings of patriotic commitment that are crucial to national integration. Diasporic American fiction has increasingly combined this tradition with symbolic magic and natural elements brought over from the “other” cultural backgrounds their authors come from. This paper aims to study the socio-political negotiations in a few instances of cultural translation within the urban/ rural dialectic in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s novels The Mistress of Spices and Queen of Dreams. I will suggest that Divakaruni’s female protagonists work their initial experience of dislocation into a discourse of nature and the earth free from boundaries, based on a rejection of urban alienation and the discovery of the reconciliatory potential of America’s nature.

Słowa kluczowe

EN

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni; ecrocriticism; migrant; narrative; relocation; rural; urban; South Asian American; translation; transnational; women’s literature

• Wydawca: Sciendo
• Czasopismo: American, British and Canadian Studies Journal
• Rocznik: 2012
• Tom: 19
• Strony: 77-86

Daty

wydano

2012-12-01

online

2013-05-01

Twórcy

autor

Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru

• University of Bucharest

Bibliografia

• Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, andthe Formation of American Culture. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1996. Print.
• Cronin, Michael. Translation and Identity. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.
• Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. The Mistress of Spices. New York: Doubleday, 1997. Print.
• - - -. Queen of Dreams. New York: Doubleday, 2004. Print.
• Kumar, Amitava. “Louder than Bombs. Review.” Transition 79 (1999): 80-101. Print.
• Momaday, N. Scott. The Way to Rainy Mountain. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1969. Print.
• Mukherjee, Bharati. “Beyond Multiculturalism: Surviving the Nineties.” Multi-America: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace. London and New York: Penguin, 1998. 454-461. Print.
• Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta & Penguin, 1991. Print.
• Vizenor, Gerald. “Almost Browne.” The Norton Anthology of AmericanLiterature. 6th ed. Ed. by Nina Baym. New York and London: Norton & Company, 2003. 2332-2337. Print.

Identyfikatory

DOI

10.2478/abcsj-2013-0005