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Jasmine Reconsidered: Narrative Discourse and Multicultural Subjectivity
University of Vermont, USA
Correspondence: robyn.warhol@uvm.edu
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Among feminist and postcolonialist readers, practically everybody hates Jasmine. When Bharati Mukherjee published her first American novel in 1989, Jasmine – the story of a young Indian woman's move from her birthplace to the United States – sold well and drew the attention of many critics interested in multicultural literature. For the moment, the heroine of Jasmine stood out in popular fiction as a one-woman figure for the South Asian diaspora, and the novel's thematic focus on Jasmine's shifting sense of herself offered the text up to the literary-critical preoccupation with identity politics that dominated the 1990s. But critics who looked at the text – especially from a postcolonial perspective – were often disgusted with what they saw. Jasmine, written by an upper-middle-class immigrant to the United States from India via Canada, got a reputation as a novel that Orientalizes and stereotypes the experience of rural Indian women,
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The Subjectivity Effect |
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Multicultural Subjectivity and Cosmopolitan Identity |
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The Anti-Individualist Heroine as an Answer to Jane Eyre |
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