친밀하고 낯선 세계: 줌파 라히리의 『질병 통역가 』와 소수적 세계시민주의

Abstract

This paper explores the way Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies renders everday as a capacious force field in which we can investigate the intersection of individuals' emotional conundrums and socio-structural crises and the mutual infiltration of the private and the public. While moving across a variety of national boundaries and constantly negotiating cultural and emotional belongings, the characters in Lahiri's literary world inhabit the unaccustomed earth and feel the unhomely. Building on Susan Koshy's formulation of minor cosmopolitanism, this paper argues for distinctive forms of epistemology that the affective aspects of exorbitant citizenship enables by inscribing abnormality, non-assimilation, and disruptions in cross-cultural and trans-national settings. Analyzing the three short stories, “Interpreter of Maladies,” “Sexy,” and “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” I argue that affective reciprocity between the marginalized bespeaks the kind of situation that allows an alternative re-figuration of global intimacy and belonging. In these stories, the unexpected connection with the cultural others creates a series of global intimacy based on contingency and discontinuity and a variety of ways of contacting and worlding the other culture and the world itself.