The Identity Crisis in "Indians" by Arthur Lee Kopit (original) (raw)
Related papers
Identity crisis- Indian English fiction of post 1980s
International Journal of English and Literature, 2013
Rapid developments in the fields of trade, market, commerce and telecommunication technologies, together with cultural confrontations at the global level are creating a paradigmatic shift in people's understanding of selfhood and identity. This paper makes a serious attempt to trace and map out the making of contemporary post-national identities within the sub continental cultural production of India and in its English fiction. One of the structural ventures of this study is that these newer identities, which are basically fragmented, ruptured, hyphenated in nature, require new descriptions and new elaborations within the field of creative literature and literary criticism. In order to pursue its research on these lines, the present work contrasts the notion of subject hood and identity with the earlier phases of Indian cultural imagination as represented in some of the pioneering works of Indian English fiction that have now attained a canonical status. By analyzing some of the predominant concerns that work as leitmotif in most of the Indian English novels, the paper brings together and reinterprets some problematic concepts such as history, culture, religion, nation and nationalism and creates a theoretical axis upon which it charts insightful and engaging aspects of selfhood and identity.
Interdisciplinary Journal of Management and Social Sciences, 2021
In recent years, scholars working in different array of humanities and other disciplines have taken intense interest in question concerning about identity. Students studying in postgraduate and undergraduate levels have devoted much of their research in identity politics of race, culture, gender, language and nationality. Hence, the term identity is not limited to one or two definitions, but it needs multiple explanations, plurality in interpretation and on top of that it demands heterogeneous elucidation, and through research.
Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of short stories which, for the most part, deals with the identity crisis of the Indian Americans who are trapped in-between their Indian heritage and the American culture. The crisis is manifest in their unremitting struggle to preserve, to integrate, and to adjust. The collection, due to its dealing with the in-between-ness, ambivalence, hybridity, and marginality of the displaced Indian Americans, is receptive to the postcolonial studies. This essay draws on the relevant ideas and concepts in the field of the diaspora identity to examine Lahiri's " A Temporary Matter, " " When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, " " Sexy, " and " This Blessed House " which portray identity crisis of the second-generation Bengali migrants. The ultimate objective is to investigate into the nature of the internal ambivalence of Lahiri's second-generation characters caused by the reciprocal influence of Host/Guest relationships. The significance of the present study is twofold; on the one hand, it accentuates the intellectual attention to the crisis of identity felt by the exponentially increasing second-generation diaspora; on the other hand, it attempts to attract concentrated scholarly interest in diaspora ambivalence which is one of Lahiri scholars' less addressed concerns.
2017
This thesis anachronistically applies Kimberle Crenshaw's term intersectionality to three dramatic texts using Thomas Postlewait's model of theatre historiography. These plays were authored by twentieth century female playwrights who had similar intersectional lives as the leads discussed. Yuki from the 1901 novel turned 1903 Broadway play A Japanese Nightingale was crafted by Winnifred Eaton. Yuki's identity will be the subject of the first chapter. The second chapter examines the identity of Rachel from Angelina Weld Grimke's anti-lynching play Rachel. For the third chapter, the identities of both female leads from Hope for a Harvest by Sophie Treadwell are analyzed. Each chapter will also investigate the strong autobiographical ties the playwrights have to their material in terms of intersectional identity and historical context. v Dedicated to
Cultural Clash: Crisis of Identity
NU Journal of Humanities, Social Sciences & Business Studies, 2015
The notion of cultural clash has come into focus recently as a consequence of the globalization of the modern world although it has always been there in reality since there have been diverse ethnic groups possessing different cultures in the same and different countries since the prehistoric time. Generally, when one culture begins to get stronger, tries to assert itself over another culture, and the other culture starts to fight back in return to preserve its own cultural identity, then the cultural clash takes place. Writers from all over the world have been exploring this theme of how exposure to a different culture results in serious cultural clash, affecting in turn people's lives drastically, in their works. For this paper, we have selected two world renowned writers, Monica Ali (1967-), a Bangladeshi British writer, and Kiran Desai (1971-), an Indian author, from this sub-continent, as they have examined this idea of cultural clash and its impact on the lives of the major characters of their respective novels Brick Lane (2003) and The Inheritance of Loss (2006). The two novels have depicted graphically that exposure to another culture mainly results in loss of identity, alienation, and ambivalence regarding one's own cultural identity; however, side by side both the novels have also shown a few cases where it seems that knowing and living in a different culture can have positive results. This paper examines these issues in details.
The Identity Crisis and the African American Literature
“The works of many African American writers lend themselves to discussions about identity politics, and several authors articulate this issues around the crisis of identity. One basic question that always surface is, to what do African American or Black authors anchor their discussions of identity: heritage/history? landscape/language?, visibility/invisibility? memory/history”?