Culture and Identity in Jhumpa Lahiri's ‘Unaccustomed Earth’

Abstract

Jhumpa Lahiri (1967- ), born in England to Bengali parents and raised in America, has been categorised as an Indian-American, post-modern, post-colonial, and Indian writer. The process of naming Lahiri has been protracted and complex. Nevertheless, the identity she selects for herself is distinct. She desires to be acknowledged solely as an American writer. Lahiri employs Russian literature as a means to build an identity for her main character. In her second collection of short stories, titled Unaccustomed Earth (2008), Lahiri utilises the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne not only to propose the title and epigraph for the collection but also to assert her inclusion in the American literary canon, as proposed by Ambreen Hai in "Re-Rooting Families: The Alter/Natal as the Central Dynamic of Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth."