A Language of Her Own: Willful Displacement and Nomadic Subjectivity in Jhumpa Lahiri

Abstract

In Other Words (2016) is the first of Jhumpa Lahiri’s writings to be published in Italian, charting the journey to self-expression enabled by her twenty-year relationship with this foreign language. Tracing Lahiri’s literary production, this article argues that the autobiographical prose of In Other Words is facilitated by a series of “willful” displacements, reworking and revising the notion of displacement, which is a pervasive theme of Lahiri’s earlier work. Moreover, it is precisely by means of these self-conscious geographical, bodily, linguistic, and literary dislocations that Lahiri articulates a kind of shifting or nomadic subjectivity, where otherness and multiplicity are re-privileged as sources of creative energy and self-affirmation.