“Immigrant” or “Post-colonial”? Towards a Poetics for Reading the Nation in Bharati Mukherjee’s The Tiger’s Daughter

Abstract

Bharati Mukherjee is arguably the most celebrated writer of the Asian immigrant experience in North America. She has honed the multiple (dis)locationsof her personal biography, which itself has been described as a text in ‘‘a kind of perennial immigration’’, into a literary and cultural poetics that she hopes would constitute ‘‘a revisionist theory for contemporary residency and citizenship’’ in the United States. ‘‘I see in the process of immigration’’, she asserts, ‘‘the stage, and the battleground, for the most exciting dramas of our time’’. Congruent with her professed aim ‘‘to redefine the nature of American and what makes an American’’ through her cultural narration of the nation, Mukherjee calls herself ‘‘not an Indian writer, not an exile, not an expatriate’’, but ‘‘an immigrant . . . [whose] . . . investment is in the American reality, not the Indian’’. Lying at the heart of Mukherjee’s cultural politics is her espousal of the ‘‘immigrant’’ aesthetic, integral to which is a rejection of fixed conceptions of national-cultural identity. In elucidating her ‘‘immigrant’’ poetics, Mukherjee describes her narratives as ‘‘stories of broken identities and discarded languages’’ that, nevertheless, represent her characters as fired by the ‘‘will to bond [themselves] to a new community’’. Significantly, it is this ‘‘will to bond’’ to a new narrative of identity that distinguishes Mukherjee’s ‘‘immigrant’’ from her ‘‘expatriate’’, whom she says is involved in ‘‘an act of sustained self-