PJAS 13 Spring-7
Izabella Kimak
(Non)Places of Bangalore: Where the East Meets the West in Bharati Mukherjee?s Miss New India
Polish Journal for American Studies, vol. 13 (Spring 2019), pp. 83-90
Abstract: This essay constitutes an attempt at reading Bharati Mukherjee’s 2011 novel, Miss New India, through the prism of spatial locations depicted in it. Unlike many of the texts in the late South
Asian American author’s oeuvre, which depict migration from the East to the West, Miss New India is located exclusively within South Asia. This notwithstanding, the novel focuses on the impact the West used to and continues to exert on the East. I would like to argue that through her depictions of places and non-places of Bangalore-the novel’s primary location-Mukherjee points to the spatial interconnectedness of the East and the West as well as to the temporal interconnectedness of the colonial past and postcolonial, late-capitalist present.
Keywords: Bharati Mukherjee, Miss New India, Re-Orientalism, non-places, postcolonialism, New India narratives
DOI: 10.7311/PJAS.13/1/2019.07