Migrations of Hope: Reading the Short Fiction of Three Indian American Women Writers

This book is an intensive attempt to analyze the gendered nature of immigrant experience portrayed in the short stories of three highly acclaimed Indian American women writers—Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Jhumpa Lahiri, whose oeuvre has gone a long way to establish the visibility and acceptability of Indians in the multicultural society of the United States. Throwing critical light upon the short fiction of these writers, this book undertakes to read their work as a much-needed literary project of hope-building amidst globally looming xenophobic tendencies, and as significant milestones towards the building of a humane, integrated, transnational, and empathetic world order. Ethnographers of their own distinct cultures as well as participators in the performance of the spirit of Americanism, these writers as the book argues, not only redefine and reshape the meaning of being American in their own subjective ways, but also script ways of being empathetically human in a globalized world that must encounter, accept, acknowledge and accommodate difference at every turn.