| Abstrakt: |
Within internationalized English fiction, Lahiri's The Namesake and Roy's The God of Small Things represent voices of critical cosmopolitanism. They describe ethnic cosmopolitans and postcolonial global migrants, and open debates on belonging and naturalization within national, transnational and even nationless spaces. This article focuses on cosmopolitan transcultural space, which allows for the existence of the gendered critical cosmopolitan characters of Roy and Lahiri. While cosmopolitanism has been stripped down to artificial aspects of a cultural construct and is criticised for hardly addressing the immigration identities in full complexity (Appadurai), it is also treated as a positive concept that appreciates differentiation rather than simple negations (Hall). Though cosmopolitanism is scrutinized and distinguished according to current needs of modern critical realms, e.g., as vernacular (Bhabha), wounded (Kristeva), or subaltern (de Sousa Santos), this article rather focuses on critical cosmopolitan space and scape as such. Critical cosmopolitanism implies the use of double consciousness, comparisons or self- reflections, but also critical internationalism and critical globalization, as well as a new reflection on reflection. It explores Roy's and Lahiri's gendered-specific identities of critical cosmopolitans who operate in a literary contact zone. The literary contact zone represents a space for creating literary identities; it is an amalgamation of Pratt's notion of "contact zone" and Appadurai's discussion of "ethnoscape in deterritorialized space." The discussion of Roy's and Lahiri's projected transnational consciousness and identification is complemented by selected theories of diaspora (Gilroy, Hall, Appadurai, Pratt) and cosmopolitanism (Appadurai, Walkovitz, Nussbaum, Kristeva). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
