Practices of (neoliberal) governmentality: racial and gendered gaze in Jhumpa Lahiri’s fiction
Michel Foucault’s notion of neoliberal governmentality is important in the context of the portrayal of the private sphere of the family by diasporic writers. Family, which is generally defined in terms of its functionality, when considering the difficulties of integration into the non-natal cultur...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia
2017
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/11295/1/16518-54519-1-PB.pdf http://journalarticle.ukm.my/11295/ http://ejournal.ukm.my/3l/issue/view/972 |
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| Summary: | Michel Foucault’s notion of neoliberal governmentality is important in the context of the portrayal of the
private sphere of the family by diasporic writers. Family, which is generally defined in terms of its functionality,
when considering the difficulties of integration into the non-natal culture from the perspective of the uprooted
migrants, is often referred to, erroneously, as the locus of privacy, individuality and autonomy. Among the
works of the contemporary writers of Indian diaspora experience in America, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of
Maladies (1999) has addressed issues of displacement, assimilation and acculturation modifying Indian
diaspora individuals and families. This essay analyses two of her short stories “Mrs. Sen’s” and “When Mr.
Pirzada Came to Dine” to examine the strategies employed to monitor, regulate and (re)form racial and
gendered identities within the seemingly private domain of the Indian diaspora families in the process of
establishing a socially acceptable congruence of images for the members of the migrant family. Using the
personal sphere of the family as an example of constraint that perpetually fixes subjects to their disciplinary
apparatuses, Lahiri portrays the capillary functioning of it through various acts of looking. This essay seeks to
explore some of the complex dynamics of the gaze in Lahiri’s stories with a particular focus on the coercive
character of power and the unequal gendering of the (examining) gaze. |
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