Nostalgia of reconstituting a home in the new location of inter-textuality: a study of the desirable daughters and tree bride by Bharati Mukherjee

In her novels, Mukherjee has designed a new diasporic narrative to define the American system which is shaped by original, foreign and occult and reinvents a semiotics of American citizenship and ethnicity with defiant challenge to traditional ways of conceiving the national. The new ethnicity has emerged ‘with a dimension of doubling; a spatialization of the subject […] the ‘third dimension’ of the mimetic frame or visual image of identity.’¹ She re-conceives identity in a translational space and recuperates the experience of diverse constituencies into a new hegemony, a neo-nationalism. Here one can locate an inexorable move towards a new form of socio-cultural order without the nostalgia of reconstituting a home in the new location of inter-textuality and synthesis. In an out-of-joint situation of space and culture the transplanted must encounter splitting and dislocations. Migrancy and dislocation, either consensual or conflictual, is a global and trans-cultural necessity. Mukherjee's protagonists are all sensitive and are differently trained in the new ethnic imagination.