This document discusses the concept of cultural hybridity in select Indian diasporic fiction. It explores how migration and globalization have led to a blending of cultural influences, traditions, and values for immigrants. Writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, and others depict the experiences of Indian immigrants who blend elements of Indian and American culture together, creating a new hybrid cultural identity and space in their adopted homelands.

1. Cultural Hybridity in select Indian
diasporic fiction

2. Culture
• “Culture may even be described as that which
makes our life worth living.”
• Civilization & Culture.
• The complimentary relationship between
culture and religion.
• The concept of purity of culture.
• Culture of an individual-class-society.

3. Factors affecting culture
• Family
• Language
• Education
• Trade-commerce
• Environment
Migration
• Forced & voluntarily
• Negative & positive consciousness

4. Globalization
• A change in the concept of culture
• The earlier migration of laborers
• Better prospects
• To accept the acceptable forms
• To retain the native culture
• Culture-belongingness-identity
• Combination of the two.

5. Hybridity
• Originally used in horticulture
• "Hybridity" the notion of impurity
• Racial hybridity- multiracial as a category.
• Combination of two different cultural entities.
• Cultural contacts
• Globalization & migration increased it.

6. A postcolonial concept
• A set of theoretical and critical strategies used
to examine the culture, literature, politics,
history, of former colonies
• Developed in the anti-colonial struggles in the
colonies
• Holy trinity of postcolonial criticism
• Edward Said- the Eurocentric universalism
• Gayatri Spivak-strategic essentialism

7. • Analyzes the distortion of the native/colonized
• The interdependence of the colonized & the
colonizer.
• The Third Space: in-between space.
• Often contradictory and ambivalent.
• Overcome the differences of cultural diversity.
• Mutual construction.
Homi Bhabha

8. Mimicry and ambivalence
• Coexistence of contradictory feelings,
impulses towards the same object
• Imitation of the white.
-To establish their superiority .
-The fear of the outcome
• For the colonized.
-eagerness to obey.
-challenge the authority.

9. Cultural hybridity
• Hybridity – a powerful tool for liberation
• International culture
• Something new and more complex.
• Hybridity provides a way out of binary thinking
• A way to resist on the part of the colonized
• Loose boundary- more productive.
• It is a camouflage; hybridity as heresy.
• Collective consciouness.

10. Cultural hybridity (con’t)
• Globalization celebrates the world of plural
cultures-multiculturalism.
• Hybridity is not a matter of cultural diversity, it
results from cultural differences.
• The gathering of the scattered.
• The immigrants are in minority
• Make a ‘hybrid cultural space’
• Newness enters the world.

11. Hybridity and diaspora
• ‘Diaspora’ -concerns the people who are scattered
away from the land of their origin.
• coming together in a different place
• A space in-between various identifications takes
place.
• Indian migrants - rich heritage of cultural traditions
• adaption of the aspects of the host culture
• rework, reform and reconfigure them in production
of a new hybrid culture

12. Indian Diasporic Fiction
• Kiran Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Chitra Benrajee
Divakaruni & Jumpha Lahiri
• Indian born, settled in U.S.A.
• Women- the carrier of culture
• The narrative technique
• Double consciousness
• Feeling unhomely
• Identity formation
• Displacement and assimilation
• New traditions and values

13. Select Fictions
• The Inheritance of Loss
• Jasmine
• Desirable Daughters
• Miss New India
• Mistress of Spices
• One Amazing thing
• Queen of Dreams
• The Namesake

14. Social implications of cultural hybridity
• The depiction of Indian and American cultural
values
• Their connection with the past- nostalgia
• Their displacement and double consciousness
• The link of the individual with the nation
• A nation narrative
• Feeling of ambivalence
• Creating liminal space
• The concept of time
• The creation of an in-between space

15. Psychological impacts
• Identity issue
• More assertive to challenges
• Modern woman- basic cultural values
• Feeling of being uprooted
• Nostalgia
• Deep sense of attachment
• Assimilation

16. Linguistic traits
• Bi-lingual
• Prefers native language at home
• Narrative technique- past & present
• Narration- first person narration
• Broken language
• Use of Indian words, phrases, idioms etc
• Cultural habits
• Indian history