biography and background Relevant links:  General Further Studies For Course Discussion:  "The Lady from Lucknow" "Management of Grief" World Literature in English (undergraduate course) (syllabus) Postconial Literature and Theory (graduate course)    General issues:

from "American Dreamer"    (from SAWN)

1. her attempts to find her identity in her Indian heritage; e.g. Tiger's Daughter, Days and Nights in Calcutta;
2. originate in Mukherjee's own experience of racism in Canada; e.g. Wife, Darkness, The Sorrow and the Terror
3. immigrant experience; e.g.The Middle Man and Other Stories, Jasmine, The Holder of the World, Leave It to Me

Short bio: (from SAWN)

Bharati Mukherjee won the National Book Critics' Circle Award for best fiction for The Middleman and other stories. Born in Calcutta, India, in 1940, she grew up in a wealthy traditional family. She studied in a Bengali-medium school for the first few years, and learnt English when she travelled with her family for three years in Europe at the age of eight. She attended the universities of Calcutta and Baroda, where she earned a master's degree in English and Ancient Indian Culture. She came to America in 1961 to attend the Writers Workshop and earned her master of fine arts and Ph.D. in English from theUniversity of Iowa. She married Canadian author Clark Blaise in 1963, immigrated to Canada in the mid-1960s and became a naturalized citizen in 1972. She was teaching English at McGill University in Montreal when she began writing fiction. After fourteen years in Canada, she found life as a "dark-skinned, non-European immigrant to Canada" very hard, so she moved with her husband to the  United States and took US citizenship. She has taught creative writing at Columbia University, New York University, and and Queens College, and is currently professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. She has two sons. She can be reached c/o Lynn Nesbit, Janklow & Nesbit Associates, 598 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10022. Phone: (212) 421-1700.

I maintain that I am an American writer of Indian origin, not because I'm ashamed of my past, not because I'm betraying or distorting my past, but because my whole adult life has been lived here, and I write about the people who are immigrants going through the process of making a home here... I write in the tradition of immigrant experience rather than nostalgia and expatriation. That is very important. I am saying that the luxury of being a U.S. citizen for me is that can define myself in terms of things like my politics, my sexual orientation or my education. My affiliation with readers should be on the basis of what they want to read, not in terms of my ethnicity or my race. (Mukherjee qtd. in Basbanes; source)
 
. . .  I'd say I'm an American writer of Bengali-Indian origin. In other words, the writer/political activist in me is more obsessed with addressing the issues of minority discourse in the U.S. and Canada, the two countries I have lived and worked in over the last thirty odd years. The national mythology that my imagination is driven to create, through fiction, is that of the post-Vietnam United States. I experience, simultaneously, the pioneer's capacity to be shocked and surprised by the new culture, and the immigrant's willingness to de-form and re-form that culture. At this moment, my Calcutta childhood and adolescence offer me intriguing, incompletely-comprehended revelations about my hometown, my family, my place in that community: the kind of revelations that fuel the desire to write an autobiography rather than to mythologize an Indian national identity.  (source)
 
. . . "Mine is a clear-eyed but definite love of America. I'm aware of the brutalities, the violances here, but in the long run my characters are survivors....I feel there are people born to be Americans. By American I mean an intensity of spirit and a quality desire. I feel American in a very fundamental way,whether Americans see me that way or not." (source)

• identity  the narrator (Nafeesa Hafeez) and her husband Iqbal --p 349 in upper-middle class; as a "not-quite" 350; 354

            the past--Muslim; the story from her neighborhood, the novels 352
            her lover, James
a woman who wants to get out 350
• international receptions p. 351
• Nafeesa at James' house 354

major images related to identity--heart 349 (representing perfect love); as a golf ball 350; 356

Biography - Criticism

Bharati Mukherjee from Postcolonial Studies at Emory

Bharati Mukherjee from SAWNET

• "American Dreamer"--An Essay from Mother Jones.

• An interview with Mukherjee
• A Critique of Bharati Mukherjee's Neo-Nationalism
• Bibliography: from Bibliographies on Canadian Literature and Culture

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