Children’s Literature through an Americanized Scope

The book contains the stories of first and second generation Indian immigrants, as well as a few stories involving ideas of otherness among communities in India. The stories revolve around the difficulties of relationships, communication and a loss of identity for those in diaspora. No matter where the story takes place, the characters struggle with the same feelings of exile and the struggle between the two worlds by which they are torn. The stories deal with the always shifting lines between gender, sexuality, and social status within a diaspora. Whether the character be a homeless woman from India or an Indian male student in the United States, all the characters display the effects of displacement in a

In Khaled Hosseini’s novel, The Kite Runner, he depicts the oppression the Hazara people face in Afghanistan through his main characters, Ali and Hassan. His vivid illustration of the demeaning behavior towards the Hazara people (Ali) set the underlying tone of this novel.

Bharathi Mukherjee’s later novels Jasmine(1989), The Holder of the World(1993) and Leave It to Me(1997) comprised her last creative phase conveniently termed here as the phase of immigration. By now she has travelled a long distance in terms of thematic perception and character portrayal. Beginning with an expatriate’s uprooted identity in the early 70’s, her creative faculty explored the transitional dilemma of characters in early 80’s, whose acculturation bids were occasionally thwarted by the complexity of cultural plurality in the adopted land. However, after the publication of The Middleman(1998), the process of cultural acclimatization appears to be complete and the characters betray the confidence of an immigrant, almost a naturalized citizen, in facing the challenges of human life.

She hatefully turns down the white sari of widowhood and its associating paraphernalia and decides to stay single in the dangerous alien land America after her husband’s fatal demise for racial violence. She perceives in India “...widows in white saris are bowing their veiled heads, serving tea to in-laws. Doves with cut-off wings” (ibid, p. 33). She gathers her mettle, “straighten her shoulders and stand taller, take a deep breath” (ibid, p. 33) and is out for the work at the store where she rarely went before her husband’s death, instead of returning to India with her husband’s family.

Most of the stories provide us with details about the experiences of first and second generation Indian immigrants in the United States, even though the characters vary greatly, they have corresponding troubles in their lives; “Lahiri constructs a conversation among her pieces” (Brada-Williams 453).

One of the themes that characterize children’s literature is the question of agency. Agency in children’s literature allows the child reader to experience a degree of autonomy in the imagined world, which the child does not possess in a world governed by adult rules and authority. However, a close reading of Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and Collins’ The Hunger Games demonstrates that children have more power and agency than they believe they do. Although children’s worlds are controlled by various restrictions, children possess the power of imagination, the ability to create their own worlds, and that is their source of autonomy and agency. As they grow older, they gradually start losing that agency as they enter into the adult world, a world governed by a different kind of obedience.

The Kite Runner (2003) by Khaled Hosseini, an Afghan-born American novelist and physician, unravels the abnormal life of a young Afghan boy Amir, who lives in the war corrupted country of Afghanistan from 1963 to 1981 and then seeks asylum in America and later returning to Afghanistan for his nephew. The novel is set from the 1970s to the year 2002 during the Taliban takeover. Hosseini’s text is foreign to me as a western reader provoking a new particular way of seeing certain ideas such as; a new perspective on violence, discrimination and the class divide in society and family honour. The author uses narrative techniques such as; involving sensory imagery, which develops the foreign setting, mood and unique ideas associated with life in Afghanistan.

Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of fictional short stories by highly acclaimed author Jhumpa Lahiri. The book illustrates the lives of first- and second- generation Indian immigrants as they face the challenges and struggles of living a culturally conflicted life in the United States. Lahiri herself was a part of an immigrant household. She was born in London in 1967. Her mother and father were both immigrants from India. They moved to the United States when she was two years old. Because her mother wanted her to grow up aware of her Indian, specifically Bengali, heritage and traditions, they frequently visited their relatives in Calcutta. Although Interpreter of Maladies is considered fictional, critics suggest that it is also autobiographical because most of them are adapted from her friends’, parents’, and acquaintances’ lives. This paper will focus on three specific stories in the book namely: When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, Mrs. Sen’s, and The Third and Final Continent. The aforementioned stories deal with the struggles and challenges faced by most immigrants, specifically, how they deal with the clashing cultures of their old heritage and their new world. Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies illustrates that although migration entails struggles and sacrifices, the expatriate characters decided to move to a foreign land because of their hopes for a better future, but the strong sense of attachment to their Indian heritage made it difficult for some to adapt to their

In her short story collection, Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri depicts various scenarios of Indian immigrants moving to and living in the United States. A particularly salient theme discussed throughout is the issue of assimilation vs. integration. Though the terms are often considered interchangeable, in this book assimilation argues for adoption of American culture. Conversely, integration advocates for the coexistence of foreign and American customs and allows immigrants to establish a sense of home away from their original countries. The story entitled, “The Third and Final Continent” specifically recounts a young Indian man’s experience trying to establish himself in Cambridge, Massachusetts after living in London. Prior to his immigration, the narrator had his marriage arranged by his family in Calcutta, and much of the story illustrates the narrator’s apprehension for his wife, Mala’s arrival from India. Recognizing that food is a significant aspect of most cultures, Lahiri uses it as a motif to indicate the transformation of the narrator’s cultural status in the United States. Through food, she ultimately asserts the possibility of positive integration, rather than just assimilation, into American society.

Not many people can say that they challenged and overcame the Jim Crow legal system, state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States from 1877 to the beginning of the Civil RIghts Movement in 1954, but nine young African- Americans in Scottsboro, Alabama did so unintentionally. They opened the eyes of many white racists, won against the Jim Crow Laws, and inspired one of the most popular books in American Literature, To Kill a Mockingbird. These nine African- Americans beat racism and they were and still are an inspiration to all Americans.

Children are highly acquiescent, and as such the media they consume is highly important in their socialization. Taking into consideration the ubiquity of media and the degree to which it is entwined in the lives of children, it is important that we be concerned with the themes presented in children’s media – including books. As noted by Taylor (2003), Children 's books are an important cultural mechanism for teaching children gender roles. If children are exposed to stereotypical images in children’s books, they may adopt these as normative, and may adjust their actions accordingly (Paynter, 2011). Given this, it is important to examine the representation(s) of gender in children’s books. In this paper I will discuss the depiction of gender in children’s books, focusing – particularly – on the manner in which boys and girls are portrayed in children’s literature. In my discussion, I will draw on Paul Kramer’s children’s book Maggie Goes on a Diet to illustrate problematic themes that are prevalent in the current children’s literature.

In the two poems “Where I Come From” and “A Different History” the poets convey their attitudes and ideas towards identity through the use of structure, language and diction, literary devices, tone and titles. Sujata Bhatt deals with ideas of nostalgia, colonization, displacement, being oppressed and conflict between the oppressor and the oppressed. Elizabeth Brewster focuses on the opposition and conflict towards the city and the country and woods.

Her characters are often caught in a cultural indeterminate state excited about their new home but grieving the loss of their country of origin. Her characters speak about the glory of common life, “I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. . . . As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.” (Lahiri, IOM 198).

The novel has a greater degree of contextualized realism than Possession. In this novel, Markandaya does not dwell on the abstract cultural concepts of East – West but rather objectifies them into actual situations and incidents, thereby effectively dramatizing the theme. The dichotomy of the East – West axis becomes more prominent in this novel because it is shown through the underserved plight of an old Indian immigrant in England; the portrait of his misery is probably the result of a deep study of the helplessness of Indian expatriates in Britain. The main thread of the novel is related to the reality that people who come to settle in a strange country have difficulties while adjusting to a new way of life. Speacially, Asians in Britain face acute problems. Strongly attached to their own religions, languages and customs, they feel that the western culture is a threat to their values and traditions and so they tend to become isolated. Hostility and racial discrimination from the host community further prompt Asians to seek support from their own groups. As they strive to preserve their culture and identify, it becomes harder for them to ‘assimilate’ to be accepted as British. The protagonist problems as he tries to fit into the corpus of British society form the content of the plot. The cross cultural situation brings about the feeling of

In a world which is only now beginning to emerge from the shackles of colonialism, both former empires and the nations once subdued by their hegemony have entered a transitional period defined by uncertainty and the loss of collective identity. Compounding matters is the delicate balance that expatriates from former colonies turned independent countries, such as Pakistan, India, and Hong Kong, must seek to achieve while residing in the former motherland of Great Britain. For the most ambitious and hopeful immigrants, the arduous process of assimilation from pre-colonial society to the very seat of imperial power which once exercised dominion over your homeland from afar can be a jarring metamorphosis. Two exquisitely written short stories published during the tumultuous postcolonial period of the late 1980s' and early 1990's, Hanif Kureishi's My Son the Fanatic and Amy Tan's Two Kinds, harness the provocative power of prose to explore the quintessentially modern cultural theme of dual and transitional identity. By juxtaposing the paternal expectation of father Parvez with the harsh reality his militarized, extremist son Ali, Kureishi exposes the fallacious notion of the "British dream" offered to immigrants from former colonies around the world. Through her wrenching tale of the divisions sewn between Chinese mothers, who lived through the Communist Cultural Revolution, and their Americanized daughters struggling to bear the burden of competing customs, Tan examines the